Obama grants 95 Christmastime pardons and commutations

Gregory Korte | USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — President Obama's decision to shorten the sentences of 95 federal prisoners Friday continued a continuing trend toward Christmastime clemency that's being criticized as part of "a broken process."

Obama said the clemency grants — the largest single-day use of his pardon power in his presidency to date — "another step forward in upholding our fundamental ideals of justice and fairness."

He also gave complete pardons to two people involved in counterfeiting and bank fraud, the White House announced.

Most of the commutations to shorter sentences dealt with drug offenders given long mandatory minimum sentences, but also included 15 gun crimes — usually while committing a drug offense — and one armed bank robbery.

Obama has now commuted the prison sentences of 184 people, more than any president since Lyndon Johnson (226) and surpassing the combined number granted by presidents Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton and George W. Bush (117).

Legal scholars who study clemency say the regular use of the pardon power is a healthy check and balance to long and expensive prison sentences. But they question why so many of Obama's grants have come in the weeks before Christmas.

"Why can't we have this good spirit all year?" said Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. He said pardons and commutations late in the year — or late in a president's term — "is a sign of a broken process."

"It's even worse if a president is 'saving up' good petitions to grant at the end of the year. That means that men and women are spending months in prison so that a political show can be scheduled for 'the most wonderful time of the year,' " he said.

With Friday's grants, 60% of the clemency warrants Obama has doled out have come in December, according to political scientist P.S. Ruckman Jr. and former Washington Post reporter George Lardner Jr., authors of the forthcoming book Guilty No More. That's more than any other modern president except Nixon.

Ruckman said Christmastime clemency leads to the perception that pardons and commutations are "gifts" and not thoroughly considered. "How is it admirable to let applications pile up in the White House? Are they deciding, then sitting on them? Not good. Are they piling them up then deciding them quickly? Not good," he said.

Obama has pledged to issue more pardons and commutations in 2016, through a clemency initiative intended to correct what he sees as an injustice in sentencing laws passed during the "war on drugs" of the 1980s and '90s. Many drug offenders were sentenced to long prison terms for trafficking in relatively small amounts of drugs — especially crack cocaine, which triggered harsher sentences than an equivalent amount of powder cocaine. Of Friday's commutations, at least 24 were for dealing crack cocaine. Eight were for marijuana.

The list included 40 people serving life sentences. Most will be released in April.

The Constitution gives the president the power to "grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States." In modern times, this clemency power takes one of two forms: a pardon, which is the complete removal of all punishment for a crime; or a commutation, which shortens a prison sentence but often continues to impose other conditions. The president's power is limited to federal offenses; most states give governors a similar power over state crimes.

"The power to grant pardons and clemency is one of the most profound authorities granted to the president of the United States," Obama wrote in a letter to each of the clemency recipients. "It embodies the basic belief in our democracy that people deserve a second chance after having made a mistake in their lives that led to a conviction under our laws."

The pardons went to Jon Dylan Girard, a physician from Centerville, Ohio, who was convicted of counterfeiting in 2002; and Melody Eileen Homa (formerly known as Melody Eileen Childress) of New Kent, Va., convicted of aiding and abetting bank fraud in 1991.

Contributing: David Jackson