Is a Major, Merciful Change in Presidential Pardon Policy Brewing?

Jacob Sullum has written
extensively
about President Barack Obama’s reputation for having very little
mercy toward federal prisoners, hardly touching his executive
authority to grant clemency. Last week, the president
provided clemency toward a drug offender who had been, due to a
mistake, sentenced to a longer sentence term than federal
sentencing guidelines dictated. That is to say, the president’s
latest act of mercy was actually fixing a paperwork mistake.

But a piece by Liz Goodwin on Yahoo News today indicates a major
shift may be coming. If the anonymous (of course) administration
source talking to Goodwin is telling the truth,
it could be big:

Now, in his final years in office, Obama … wants to use his
previously dormant pardon power as part of a larger strategy to
restore fairness to the criminal-justice system. A senior
administration official tells Yahoo News the president could grant
clemency to “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of people locked up for
nonviolent drug crimes by the time he leaves office—a stunning
number that hasn’t been seen since Gerald Ford extended amnesty to
Vietnam draft dodgers in the 1970s.

The scope of the new clemency initiative is so large that
administration officials are preparing a series of personnel and
process changes to help them manage the influx of petitions they
expect Obama to approve.  Among the changes is reforming
the recently censured office within the Justice Department
responsible for processing pardon petitions. Yahoo News has learned
that the pardon attorney, Ronald Rodgers, who was criticized in a
2012 Internal watchdog report for mishandling a high-profile
clemency petition, is likely to step down as part of that overhaul.
Additional procedures for handling large numbers of clemency
petitions could be announced as soon as this week, a senior
administration official said, though it could take longer.

Sources for Goodwin’s story partly lay the blame for Obama’s
terrible record for pardons on the Office of the Pardon Attorney,
part of the Department of Justice:

The pardon attorney, former military judge Ronald Rodgers, sends
his recommendations of whether or not to grant the petitions to the
Deputy Attorney General’s office, which then sends them on to the
White House. The pardon attorney was recommending that the
president deny nearly every single petition for a pardon or a
reduced sentence, according to one senior official in the Obama
administration.

But even though the president was almost certainly aware that
the pardon process was deeply flawed, he took no steps to fix it.
In 2009, Obama’s top lawyer, Gregory Craig, drafted a proposal
urging a more aggressive use of the presidential pardon and
clemency power, and calling the current system broken. One of
Craig’s recommendations was to take the pardon attorney’s office
out of the Department of Justice entirely, so that the people
vetting clemency petitions were not so close to the system that put
prisoners away in the first place.

“I was of the belief that the current system for making pardon
decisions was broken and it needed to be reformed,” Craig said. His
suggested reforms weren’t implemented, and he left the White House
that year.

Read the full, thorough accounting of the disparity between the
administration’s stated positions and what was actually going on in
the Office of the Pardon Attorney
here.

Attorney General Eric Holder essentially verified Goodwin’s
story (the outcome, if not the internal conflcit) later in the day
by
announcing an “expanded program” that will lead to additional
requests for clemency. But will more drug war prisoners actually
get pardons?