The clemency call came on the heels of Attorney General Eric Holder urging Congress to pass the bi-partisan Smarter Sentencing Act and his August 2013 directive to federal prosecutors not to charge low-level nonviolent drug offenders in a way that would trigger what he has called "draconian" mandatory minimum sentences.

But while Obama and his top legal appointees clearly think now is the time to push for an historic fix to broken drug policies, they are short on specifics.

In his speech, Cole offered a sketch of which prisoners might qualify for clemency. He said the government was seeking petitioners who had a clean prison record; do not present a threat to public safety; had a low-level role in the drug operation; and who are facing a life or near-life sentence that is excessive under current law, conditions which would exclude those who had any significant ties to large-scale organizations, gangs, or cartels. Clemency, Cole's criteria also implied, would not be limited to crack.

At points, Cole's criteria seemed contradictory. He cited Aaron and the seven others whose sentences were commuted in December as examples of ideal candidates, though it's likely not all of them would have qualified under his criteria.

Cole's reference to alleviating the overwhelming prison population also seemed to suggest that the Justice Department envisioned a significant number of sentence commutations. But his vague guidance has made it hard to project how many prisoners might qualify. For example, it's not clear which sentences might qualify as "near life," let alone how many petitions the Obama administration wants to grant. The Justice Department declined to say whether it had estimated how many people might qualify and how many the government expected to apply.

Nonetheless, Margaret Colgate Love, who was Aaron's lawyer and former Pardon Attorney under presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, said Cole's plea was more than symbolic.

"It seems to me there would be no reason for the number-two official in the Justice Department to make the speech he did if the administration was not serious about using the pardon power in a systematic way to correct sentences the President himself has described as unjust," she said.

Opening the flood gates

Word of the clemency push has already spread among prisoners serving lengthy drug sentences, according to Aaron.

"People are talking about it, and discussing 'how do I do this, what is the best means of doing it,'" he says. "They thought it was always rubber stamped 'no,' but now they feel like it will be read, that they will have an opportunity to show that 'this is the person I am, not the person I was on that one particular day.'"

Indeed, the New York Bar Association, which said it was not aware that a major policy announcement would be made at its January luncheon was caught off guard. The group has begun to look into how it might respond to Cole's call.

Samuel T. Morison, a former staff attorney under the Pardon Attorney and now a criminal defense lawyer in Washington, D.C., says the Justice Department has created unrealistic expectations. Prisoners have already contacted him to ask where they can "sign up" for their presidential commutation.

"They risk opening the flood gates," Morison says.

On Feb. 21, roughly a month after Cole's speech, representatives from some of the main organizations that have long opposed the tactics of the war on drugs — the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Federal public defender and Families Against Mandatory Minimums — were asked to meet with Cole at the Justice Department. While they kept details of the meeting private, in its wake, the groups formed an initiative they called the Clemency Project 2014.

Left with only Cole's speech, the December clemency cases, and Holder's August 2013 directive, the groups have been parsing the government's words to paint a picture of ideal clemency candidates.

The groups anticipate they will send the Pardon Attorney applications of inmates who not only would have been sentenced differently today — the kinds of cases addressed by the Smarter Sentencing Act — but also those who would be charged differently today under Holder's new policies, potentially widening the pool of candidates even more.

They are also trying to staff a project whose numbers they still can't estimate: The clemency process has to be initiated by prisoners and, without large staffs of their own, the groups will rely heavily on volunteer lawyers. The project then plans to provide free training, support and resources for those lawyers.

According to Clemency Project 2014, the Bureau of Prisons will notify all inmates of the clemency call and direct them to contact the project if they are interested.

Of course, inmates are unlikely to take themselves out of the running, making the culling process more challenging, says Mark Osler, director of the Federal Commutations Clinic at the Univ. of St. Thomas (MN).

"I think DOJ is counting on the private sector to do this and in a coordinated way," he says.

While the groups are not projecting precise numbers, Vanita Gupta, Director of the ACLU's Center for Justice, says, "We believe there is a substantial number of people who are eligible in the federal system pursuant to the criteria."

Tarnished office

Ultimately, the petitions will still go through the Office of the Pardon Attorney (OPA), where Aaron's quest for relief was repeatedly thwarted, according to the Inspector General's report.

Aaron's first petition, filed in 2000, was pending for eight years before it was denied. (The joint ProPublica and Washington Post investigation of the Office of the Pardon Attorney showed that from 2001 to 2008, white applicants were nearly four times as likely to receive presidential pardons as minorities.)

Aaron applied again in 2010. Three years later, he received the news of Obama's clemency and was told he would get to go home, long after his co-defendants had been released and returned to their lives.

"The Office of the Pardon Attorney is not really functional," says Amy Baron-Evans, sentencing resource counsel at the federal public defender's office. "We hope that we don't need to remind [the Justice Department] how badly this has gone in the past, and we hope they will do something different."

Notably, the Pardon Attorney did not attend the meeting between the Clemency Project leaders and the Justice Department, according to people familiar with the meeting but who did not attend. (A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on whether he attended.)

The Justice Department did not respond to questions about the status of the Inspector General's investigation into Rodgers' handling of Aaron's clemency application.

In addition to the pending investigation report, people familiar with the OPA also raised questions about staffing. According to the Pardon Attorney's website, there are 2,785 commutation applications and 754 pardon applications already pending so far this year. Estimates have the staff at 6 people.

"They have a backed up pipeline at one end, and they're inviting more to come in the other," says Nancy Hoppock, executive director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law, which runs the Mercy Project, an effort that pursues commutations for federal prisoners. "If the White House is serious about this, they're going to have to augment, at least temporarily, the resources of the Office of the Pardon Attorney."

The Justice Department, meanwhile, says the government is prepared.

"The deputy attorney general has directed the Pardon Attorney's office to make commutation applications a priority, and the department is committed to devoting the resources necessary to make sure we are able to handle any new petitions," a spokesperson said.

While the Justice Department declined to say how many people might be added to OPA's small staff, the department said Cole has assigned two people in his office to oversee the clemency push.

"We are taking DOJ at its word, and it seems to be signaling this is not business as usual," says the ACLU's Gupta. "We are encouraged by that, but there are no guarantees."

She adds, "If it turns out it nothing has changed, we are going to face that then."

An historical precedent — ignored

The Obama administration, meanwhile, doesn't seem interested in reviving what is the most often recommended model to resolve the crack and cocaine sentencing disparities: the Ford Clemency Board.

Created in 1974 by President Gerald Ford, it heard clemency applications from draft violators and those who deserted the military during the Vietnam War era. Between 21,000 and 27,000 people petitioned the board, all were reviewed, and around 90 percent were granted clemency. The board, which existed for one year, initially had nine members, but because of the workload was expanded to 19. It employed approximately 400 staff attorneys, who handled most of the file reviews.

Between 1961 and 1963, President John F. Kennedy, working through the Pardon Attorney, also commuted the sentences of several hundred people sentenced under the mandatory minimum penalties of the Narcotics Act of 1956, after they also came to be seen as too harsh. While that was a sizeable proportion of the federal prison population then, the number is dwarfed by today's potential pool, which is why the Ford model is more often invoked.

At the University of St. Thomas, Osler, who also authored a 2011 article recommending the Ford approach, says the model "returns the pardon power to its proper place rather than the bottom drawer where Clinton and Bush left it to fester."

"I always saw it as an affirmative duty; it's part of the job," says Robert Ehrlich, a former Republican Governor of Maryland who founded a clemency clinic at Catholic University's Columbus School of Law that educates governors and their staff about clemency.

When he was governor, Ehrlich assigned five lawyers in his office to consider clemency cases. In one term, he granted 227 pardons and 21 commutations.

"There's a strong tradition of using that power by executives in this country as a tool to help balance the scales of justice," he says. "Regardless of party, we need to take that power seriously."

Osler says the Ford board's most important feature was that it was created outside of the Justice Department and was bi-partisan. Now, he says he sees the current process as backwards both ways.

"You've got the mercy process embedded in the house of prosecutors and the defenders — who have the opposite problem — discerning which applications are inappropriate," he says.

Morison, the defense lawyer who worked for the Pardon Attorney for 13 years, says the office's approach is driven by institutional self-interest and a desire to keep old sentences in effect.

In the last days of the President Bill Clinton's administration, when "the word on the street was the president is going to grant some commutations, and he wants to do something big," Morison said the news spread quickly in the prison system, and soon the long hallway outside his office was lined with rows of commutation applications five boxes high.

"No one even opened them until Clinton left office," he said. Similarly, when President George W. Bush sought to grant more commutations and asked the Pardon Attorney to recommend more applications, the office refused to give more than just a handful.

"They know they can run the clock out," Morison says.

He said he was skeptical that the Justice Department was prepared and committed to approve more than a symbolic number of commutations.

"Traditionally, OPA are looking for a reason to say 'no,'" he says. "It would be a sea change if now they are looking for a reason to say 'yes.'"

Freedom

Aaron, meanwhile, thinks the clemency call is a great idea.

"You do have a lot of guys inside fences and walls that are working on themselves, who like me didn't want their situation to define who they are as a person," he says. "We did need to be punished, but to the extent that we were?"

For those who thought Aaron was punished too severely, his April release will be a long time coming.

"When Clarence got [clemency], so many of us had tears in our eyes," says the ACLU's McCurdy. "It was very emotional for many of us who have been looking at his case for years."

Aaron is aware that people who might oppose his release or the president's clemency push will be watching him to see if he gets in trouble again. But he says, "I welcome the scrutiny and have nothing to hide."

When his day of freedom comes, Aaron knows exactly what he's going to do first, after thanking God.

Stumbling for the first time with words and emotion, he says, "In 2005 my baby sister passed. I'm going to go to her grave."

On Thursday, Feb. 27, 2014, Aaron, who had been moved to a halfway house after his sentence was commuted and was scheduled for April 17 release, was told he would serve the rest of his time under house confinement. The following day, he went home.