Pubdate: Thu, 24 Apr 2014
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2014 The Washington Post Company
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/mUgeOPdZ
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Sari Horwitz
Page: A2

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT OUTLINES CRITERIA FOR CLEMENCY

An Obama administration initiative to encourage nonviolent drug
offenders in federal prison to seek clemency is likely to trigger tens
of thousands of petitions, and the government could be processing
applications for the next three years, according to lawyers and civil
rights activists. MICHEL DU CILLE/THE WASHINGTON POST Julie Stewart
founded Families Against Mandatory Minimums after her brother was sent
to prison for five years for growing marijuana.

Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole on Wednesday laid out the six
criteria that Justice Department lawyers will consider when they
review clemency requests from some of the country's 219,000 federal
inmates. The initiative is part of an effort to reduce the prison
population and end disparities in drug sentencing that, for instance,
led those trafficking in crack cocaine to receive much longer
sentences than people dealing the same substance in powder form.

"For our criminal justice system to be effective, it needs to not only
be fair but it also must be perceived as being fair," Cole said.
"Older, stringent punishments that are out of line with sentences
imposed under today's laws erode people's confidence in our criminal
justice system."

Offenders seeking clemency will have to have served at least 10 years
of their sentence, have no significant criminal history, and no
connection to gangs, cartels or organized crime. Applicants also must
be inmates who probably would have received a "substantially lower
sentence" if convicted of the same offense today. And to be eligible,
they must have demonstrated good conduct in prison.

"We will get tens of thousands of applications," said Julie Stewart,
president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. "This is a very
complicated, many-layered project. It will go on until the end of the
Obama administration."

The Justice Department is planning to send surveys to all federal
inmates by May 2 to start identifying applicants. Cole also sent a
letter to the 93 U.S. attorneys asking for their help in selecting
meritorious clemency candidates.

The Bureau of Prisons will send the completed surveys to Clemency
Project 2014, an umbrella organization that will sift through the
forms to find the ones that appear to meet the Justice Department's
criteria. The Clemency Project - composed of Stewart's organization,
the federal public defenders, the American Civil Liberties Union, the
American Bar Association and the National Association of Criminal
Defense Lawyers - is working to recruit and train lawyers how to
screen inmates for eligibility.

Prisoners will be offered pro bono lawyers to help them prepare their
clemency applications.

"Our federal sentencing laws have shattered families and wasted
millions of dollars," said Vanita Gupta, the ACLU's deputy legal
director. "Too many people, particularly people of color, have been
locked up for far too long for nonviolent offenses. The president now
has a momentous opportunity to correct these injustices in individual
cases."

For some of the activists, the issue is deeply personal. Stewart's
brother, Jeff, was sent to federal prison for a mandatory five years
for growing marijuana.

He had cultivated 365 six-inch marijuana plants in Washington state,
where the drug is now legal. She thought what he did was "stupid" but
assumed he would get off with a relatively light sentence because it
was "only marijuana."

"The judge said, 'I don't want to give you this much time but I have
no choice because Congress has determined your sentence when they
passed the mandatory sentencing laws for drug crimes,' " Stewart said.
"That was the spark that ignited my mission. I always thought judges
judge and determine the punishment that fits the crime. But the judge
couldn't do anything about my brother's sentence."

With the help of two lawyer friends, Stewart found others affected by
the strict mandatory sentences, organized meetings for people
nationwide to share their experiences and began working to change the
laws through Families Against Mandatory Minimums, which she founded in
1991.

"When I started my group, sentencing reform was such a fringe issue,"
she said. "Nobody knew anything about it and nobody cared. We've been
working so hard for so many years to build bipartisan support. People
are serving decades behind bars for nonviolent mistakes they made in
their 20s."

To handle the expected flood of applications, the Justice Department
is detailing dozens of lawyers to the Pardon Attorney's Office. Senior
Justice Department lawyer Deborah Leff will be taking over as pardon
attorney from Ronald L. Rodgers, who has headed the office since 2008.

"What the Obama administration has done today is breathe new life into
this moribund office, which has done practically nothing for a long
time," Stewart said.

The Washington Post and ProPublica published a series of articles
beginning in 2011 that showed significant racial disparities in the
awarding of presidential pardons. One of the articles showed how
Rodgers withheld key facts from the White House in the high-profile
clemency case of Clarence Aaron, a first-time offender serving a
triple life sentence for a minor role in a drug crime.

Rodgers engaged in "conduct that fell substantially short of the high
standards expected of Department of Justice employees and the duty he
owed the President of the United States," said Justice Department
Inspector General Michael Horowitz in a report requested by Congress.
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