George Lardner Jr., a former Post reporter, is scholar in residence at American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop. P.S. Ruckman Jr. is a professor of political science and editor of the Pardon Power Blog.
When the Obama administration’s new acting pardon attorney, Bob Zauzmer, arrived on the job last month, he ran headlong into a backlog of more than 9,000 clemency petitions awaiting a decision on whether they deserve the president’s consideration. Many of those petitions were the byproduct of the announcement of Clemency Project 2014, which was established by the Justice Department — to great fanfare — to process additional applications from federal prisoners seeking reductions of unjustifiably long drug sentences.
Zauzmer has his work cut out for him — it has been widely reported that his predecessor, Deborah Leff, stepped down in January over frustrations with a lack of resources.
Was the administration ever serious about Clemency 2014? The rules for commutation requests even reaching the overburdened pardons office under the initiative are inexcusably discouraging. The worst is that inmates must have served at least 10 years of their sentence. Other rules state they must not have “a significant criminal history” (whatever that means); they must be nonviolent, low-level offenders; and they must be serving a sentence harsher than they would have gotten if convicted of the same offense today. Those who fall “outside of this initiative,” according to the Justice Department, can still seek clemency under the old rules if their applications are “especially meritorious.”