Ramona Brant is one of 1,324 people serving long terms for relatively minor drug crimes to be freed by the president but his successor is unlikely to follow suit

Last April, two months after Ramona Brant walked free from prison having served 21 years of a life sentence for a first-time non-violent drug offense, she found herself outside the Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington as a convoy of limousines drew up. A tall black man got out of the central vehicle and greeted her with the immortal words: “Hey Ramona, come on, I’m taking you to lunch.”

“I was no good, I couldn’t think,” Brant recalls. “This is the person who used his executive power to say ‘Enough is enough, you can go home now’. Then he invites me to lunch. I couldn’t believe this.”

By the end of lunch, Brant had composed herself sufficiently to make Obama a heartfelt promise. She told him that she would not allow his name to be tainted by anything she did that would send her back to prison.

“I will honor you with my freedom,” she said. “And that is what I have done.”

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Brant is one of 1,324 women and men who will honor Obama with their freedom long after he vacates the White House in less than three weeks’ time. Most of them, like her, were serving long prison sentences – 395 of them for life – for relatively minor drug crimes imposed during the so-called “war on drugs”.

Brant’s case was particularly brutal. She had no history of drug dealing when in 1994 she was arrested and charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine valued by the prosecution at $37m. “I have never sold drugs at all in my life. Never once.”

Yet through association with her violent and abusive boyfriend, who forced her to accompany him when he went on interstate drug runs by beating her and threatening to kill members of her family, she was accused of personally trafficking large amounts of crack cocaine and powder cocaine – quantities she says were entirely fictitious.

“Those amounts never existed, there was nothing there. They were based on what my co-defendants traded among themselves, and all of that was lumped together and I was held responsible for it.”

Even the trial judge as he sentenced her to remain behind bars for the rest of her natural life complained that putting her away forever made no sense. But his hands were tied – the sentence was mandatory.

Her former boyfriend remains in prison on a life sentence.

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Obama cited Brant’s case in the long article he wrote last week for the Harvard Law Review looking back on his impact on criminal justice reform. “Ramona’s case is in many ways emblematic of the problems with overly harsh mandatory sentences in the federal system,” he said.

Brant says that she kept her spirits up over 21 long years in the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, by placing her trust in God. Her prayers were answered last December when she received a letter from Obama saying that he believed in her and was giving her a second chance by commuting her sentence.

“To see the letter, and his signature! I just sat there reading it over and over, it was surreal.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barack Obama escorts Ramon Brant to the Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington DC on 30 March 2016. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

Multiply that overwhelming joy by 1,324 and you start to get a sense of the human scale of Obama’s clemency project. In any future assessment of his legacy, his flinging open of the prison gates to so many victims of the drug war is certain to loom large.

“What he’s done has been unprecedented,” said Kara Gotsch of the Sentencing Project. “These people were the victims of policies that trapped them in the criminal justice system for low-level drug offenses – these weren’t the drug kingpins.”

One of the strengths of Obama’s clemency drive is its power to act as a model for individual states that are responsible for the incarceration of the overwhelming majority of prisoners in America. While there are about 190,000 people held in the federal penal system – almost half of them for drug offenses – there are close to 2 million under state lock and key.

“President Obama has tried to set an example on the national stage, and that is critically important in shifting the needle on what is fair and proportionate. The whole country is looking at this,” Gotsch said.

Obama’s embrace of commutations comes at the end of a singularly frustrating period for criminal justice reform. A year ago there were high hopes that a bipartisan coalition of forces, from the rightwing Koch brothers to the ACLU, would effect legislative change that would bring freedom to thousands of largely black Americans caught up in the harsh mandatory sentencing of the drug war.

When those hopes were dashed on the rock of Republican intransigence in the House of Representatives, Obama turned to his presidential power to grant clemency without the need for congressional approval. It would be comparatively slight compared with the initial ambition to overhaul the entire justice system, but it would be something.

“This is his last shout to try and bring relief to as many people as possible,” Gotsch said.

It has certainly come late in the day for the Obama presidency. Until he announced the clemency project in 2014, Obama displayed scant interest in this area – indeed during the whole of his first term he granted pardons or commutations to only 23 people.

As recently as last March criminal justice experts were lamenting in the Washington Post that his record on pardons – where individuals have their legal liabilities erased as opposed to commutations where their convictions still stand – was so poor that Obama could go down as “one of the most merciless presidents in history”. It was only in 2016 that his drive for clemency really picked up speed, with 1,171 of the 1,324 lucky recipients gaining their freedom in the course of last year alone.

Obama’s sudden burst of activity rocketed him from being a no-show on the clemency league table to being a titan among postwar presidents. Many of the reports on his late conversion to commuting and pardoning prisoners have noted that he has wielded his clemency power more times than the previous 11 presidents combined.

That characterization is misleading. Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St Thomas who set up the first clemency legal clinic in the country, points out that Obama holds such a distinction only if you discount the clemency record of Gerald Ford.

In 1974, the Republican president granted clemency to 14,000 draft dodgers and deserters of the Vietnam war. That was a brave move, Osler contends, given that at the time “draft dodgers were as popular as crack dealers are today”.

Ford achieved his massive clemency rate by setting up a lean bipartisan operation that could push petitions through with minimum bureaucracy. By contrast, Osler criticizes the Obama clemency project for operating a system of review that is so cumbersome it has gummed up the process.

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The professor lists seven consecutive hurdles, spanning four federal buildings, that any prisoner must negotiate to have her or his petition granted: “The petition goes from a staff person at the pardon attorney’s office to the pardon attorney, then it goes to a staff person at the deputy attorney general’s office to the deputy attorney general, then to the staff at the White House counsel’s office then to the White House counsel, and finally to the president. And people are surprised that the results are so uneven.”

As a lawyer who has represented more than 60 petitioners, Osler is keenly aware of the impact of Obama’s efforts. For the 1,324 beneficiaries, he said, “this was an incredible act of grace. The restoration to society matters, not just to them but to their families and communities.”

But he is also keenly aware that the vast majority of more than 30,000 prisoners who have petitioned the president have been denied clemency or are still waiting for an answer. “The problem is, I feel like the person after the shipwreck in the lifeboat seeing all the other people in the water.”

Ramona Brant knows that feeling all too intimately. Many of her fellow prisoners – she calls them her “sisters” – are still incarcerated. “There are still too many of my sisters left behind,” she says.

Hopes for those people are fading with every day. President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for US attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has been scathing of Obama’s clemency project, denouncing it as an abuse of executive power. The chances of the Trump administration continuing to push for release of low-level drug offenders is slim to none.

Ramona Brant with her two sons, now grown up. Photograph: Brant family

As a way of doing her bit to keep the flame alive, Brant has spent much of the past year since she was released last February traveling the country speaking about the dual scourges of domestic violence and mass incarceration. She uses the power of her personal story to try to influence change.

“I didn’t just study criminal justice, I lived it. This has been my life and that of so many other women. The system is structured to incarcerate people, black women like me.”

Brant, who was a mother of two young sons by her co-defendant and former boyfriend when she was arrested, thinks back on all the precious moments she missed over 21 years in a cell. “I missed an opportunity to be a mother to my own children, to watch the first tooth come out, to take them to the first day of school; I wasn’t by my father’s side when he died, or there when my mom was put to rest; I missed my first two grandchildren being born. No matter how many pictures you have on your wall they cannot replace the images in your mind, and I have no images.”



She was there four months ago, however, at the birth of her third grandchild. She has begun to fill up the void.

She thanks Obama for that. “He has given me an amazing gift, and I wish there was a way to express my gratitude. He knows he gave me a second chance, but I don’t think he knows the depth of what it really means to be free.”