In a continued push for criminal justice reform, President Barack
Obama commuted the sentences of 111 additional inmates, the White House
announced Tuesday.
Obama broke his previous single-day record when he pardoned 214 federal inmates
earlier this month. According to the White House, a whopping 325 people
were granted clemency this August, making it the greatest number of
commutations ever granted by a president in a single month.
“We must remember that these are individuals — sons, daughters,
parents, and in many cases, grandparents — who have taken steps toward
rehabilitation and who have earned their second chance,” White House
Counsel Neil Eggleston wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “They are
individuals who received unduly harsh sentences under outdated laws for
committing largely nonviolent drug crimes.”
The majority of those pardoned Tuesday were serving lengthy sentences
for cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine trafficking, USA Today reports. Thirty-five individuals also had their life sentences commuted.
Obama has fiercely defended his use of commutations and continues to
work with bi-partisan Congress to make sweeping criminal justice
reforms. However, legislation aimed at ending unduly harsh sentencing
for drug offenses remain stalled on Capitol Hill.
“As successful as we’ve been in reducing crime in this country, the
extraordinary rate of incarceration of nonviolent offenders has created
its own set of problems that are devastating,” the president said at a
press conference earlier this month. “Entire communities have been
ravaged where largely men, but some women, are taken out of those
communities. Kids are now growing up without parents. It perpetuates a
cycle of poverty and disorder in their lives. It is disproportionately
young men of color that are being arrested at higher rates, charged and
convicted at higher rates, and imprisoned for longer sentences.”
According to NPR, the Department of Justice is also working to clear a
backlog of unreviewed drug cases. Deputy Attorney General Sally Q.
Yates asserted that the DOJ would be able to get through the cases and
address thousands of clemency requests from drug offenders before Obama
leaves office in 2017.
“At our
current pace, we are confident that we will be able to review and make a
recommendation to the president on every single drug petition we
currently have,” Yates said.
The news site reports that since the Justice Department and the White House launched the initiative for drug offenders two
years ago, volunteer lawyers and officials were flooded with clemency
petitions from sex offenders, violent criminals and white-collar
criminals.
“The president’s view is that he would like to grant as many worthy petitions as get to his desk, and I think he’s going to tell me to put worthy petitions on his desk until the last day, and that’s what I intend to do,” Eggleston said.
To date, Obama has commuted 637 federal inmates, more commutations than the last nine presidents combined.
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