Justice Department Officials Announce a Clemency Program to Correct Injustices and Relieve Overcrowding. WASHINGTON - The Justice Department on Wednesday unveiled the most ambitious federal clemency program in 40 years, inviting thousands of jailed drug offenders and other convicts to seek early release as part of a new program intended to correct sentencing injustices and relieve prison overcrowding. Though eligibility restrictions may limit how many prisoners are ultimately released to several hundred, experts said they had not seen such a sweeping use of presidential clemency power to achieve a policy goal since President Ford's amnesty for Vietnam draft dodgers in the 1970s. [continues 671 words]
Cutting Prison Population, Fairer Sentencing Are Goals WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama's administration is encouraging some nonviolent federal prisoners to apply for early release. It's an effort to deal with high costs and overcrowding in prisons, and also a matter of fairness, the government said. On Wednesday, the U.S. Justice Department unveiled a revamped clemency process directed primarily at low-level felons imprisoned for at least 10 years who have clean records while in custody. The effort is part of a broader administration push to scale back harsh penalties in some drug-related prosecutions and to address sentencing disparities arising from the 1980s crack-cocaine epidemic that yielded disproportionately tough punishment for black drug offenders. [continues 1358 words]
U.S. Plans to Cut Sentences for Some Nonviolent Offenders WASHINGTON - The U.S Justice Department invited thousands of federal convicts on Wednesday to request their release from prison, a measure that could have an outsized effect in Baltimore, where U.S. prosecutors have worked closely with local authorities. The Obama administration's plan is intended in part to lessen harsh sentences handed down under laws enacted amid fears about crack in the mid-1980s but rolled back since then. Judges have reduced many prison terms as drug distribution laws changed, but their powers have been limited by mandatory minimum sentencing rules. [continues 1074 words]
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. [continues 740 words]
WASHINGTON - The Justice Department is encouraging nonviolent federal inmates who have behaved in prison, have no significant criminal history and have already served more than 10 years behind bars to apply for clemency, officials announced Wednesday. The initiative is part of a broader Obama administration effort to trim the nation's prison population, ease sentencing disparities arising from drug possession crimes and scale back the use of strict punishments for drug offenders without a violent past. The goal is to create a larger pool of eligible prisoners the Justice Department can recommend to the president to consider for shorter sentences. [continues 419 words]
Editor's Note: J.M. Smith has improved greatly. He is breathing on his own, but remains unable to move anything but his eyes and his right middle finger. His doctors see a long, arduous road ahead. When Dick Cheney saw what Mr. Smith was tapping out for you this week, he flew into a rage and threatened briefly to unplug our cannabis maven's ventilator. Mr. Smith answered the only way he could-the way he surely would regardless-with his right middle finger. The former vice president grudgingly kept J.M. Smith alive. [continues 613 words]
Clemencies Gain Bipartisan Support In a move that could result in the prison release of hundreds or thousands of low-level drug offenders, the Justice Department said Monday that it will advise President Obama to widen his guidelines for granting clemency. The announcement, immediately praised by advocates for reform of the criminal justice system, is part of the administration's effort to reduce the nation's prison population and address racial disparities in drug sentencing. It remains unclear how effective the approach will be and whether the president is prepared to move forward on what may be an unprecedented wave of pardons and commutations. [continues 687 words]
Justice Dept. Expects Thousands of Cases Administration Effort Aimed at Nonviolent Prisoners The Obama administration is beginning an aggressive new effort to foster equity in criminal sentencing by considering clemency requests from as many as thousands of federal inmates serving time for drug offenses, officials said Monday. The initiative, which amounts to an unprecedented campaign to free nonviolent offenders, will begin immediately and continue over the next two years, officials said. The Justice Department said it expects to reassign dozens of lawyers to its understaffed pardons office to handle the requests from inmates. [continues 693 words]
Attorney General Eric Holder is endorsing a proposal that would reduce prison sentences for people convicted of dealing drugs, the latest sign of a retrenchment in the war on drugs by the administration of President Barack Obama. In January, the U.S. Sentencing Commission proposed changing federal guidelines to lessen the average sentence for drug dealers by about one year, to 51 months from 62 months. Holder testified before the commission Thursday in support of the plan. With the support of several Republicans in Congress, the attorney general is separately pushing for the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug crimes. In January, the Justice Department issued a call encouraging low-level criminals serving lengthy sentences on crack-cocaine charges to apply for clemency. [continues 611 words]
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is endorsing a proposal that would reduce prison sentences for people convicted of dealing drugs, the latest sign of the Obama administration's retrenchment in the so-called war on drugs. In January, the United States Sentencing Commission proposed changing federal guidelines to lessen the average sentence for drug dealers by about one year, to 51 months from 62 months. Mr. Holder testified before the commission on Thursday in support of the plan. With the support of several Republicans in Congress, the attorney general is separately pushing for the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug crimes. In January, the Justice Department issued a call encouraging low-level criminals serving lengthy sentences on crack cocaine charges to apply for clemency. [continues 623 words]
Attorney General Eric Holder is endorsing a proposal that would reduce prison sentences for people convicted of dealing drugs, the latest sign of the Obama administration's retrenchment in the war on drugs. In January, the U.S. Sentencing Commission proposed changing federal guidelines to lessen the average sentence for drug dealers by about one year, to 51 months from 62 months. Holder testified before the commission Thursday in support of the plan. With the support of several Republicans in Congress, the attorney general is separately pushing for the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug crimes. In January, the Justice Department issued a call encouraging low-level criminals serving lengthy sentences on crack cocaine charges to apply for clemency. [continues 357 words]
WASHINGTON - With more than half of all federal prisoners serving time on drug charges , the Obama administration says it's time to free more lowlevel drug offenders. "This is where you can help," Deputy Attorney General James Cole told the New York State Bar Association last week, urging lawyers to assist prisoners in creating "well-prepared petitions" to apply for executive clemency. But while the Justice Department promotes the plan, the Obama team is making it clear that it has no interest in changing the federal law that sends many nonviolent drug offenders to prison in the first place: the one that outlaws marijuana. [continues 1242 words]
White House Will Seek Federal Inmates for Clemency The Obama administration, stepping up its efforts to overhaul the criminal justice system, called Thursday for the early release of more low-level, nonviolent drug offenders from federal prisons. Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole, speaking to the New York State Bar Association's Criminal Justice Section, said the administration wants to free inmates who no longer pose a threat to public safety and whose long-term incarceration "harms our criminal justice system." He appealed to defense lawyers to identify candidates for clemency. [continues 543 words]
A Senate Committee Approves a Bipartisan Bill That Would Cut Lengthy Jail Terms for Many Offenders. WASHINGTON - Most mandatory drug sentences would be cut in half under a bipartisan bill approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, another victory in the campaign to roll back decades-old laws that require lengthy jail terms for drug offenders and, according to critics, fall heaviest on minorities. The committee voted 13 to 5 to change most mandatory minimum jail terms from five, 10 or 20 years to two, five or 10 years, and to make retroactive a 2010 law that reduced the sentences for possession of crack cocaine compared with those for powder cocaine. Mandatory minimum terms are applied in about 15,000 drug sentences a year. [continues 481 words]
Longtime marijuana activist Ed "NJWeedman" Forchion has been sprung from the joint. Superior Court Judge Charles Delehey vacated Forchion's 270-day sentence during a hearing Thursday at the Burlington County Courthouse in Mount Holly. Delehey instead imposed a time-served sentence, meaning the Rastafarian author and self-proclaimed "Superhero to Potheads" is officially done his term at the Burlington County Jail after serving 130 days. The hearing effectively ended four years of legal wranglings, including two trials, after Forchion, a resident of both Pemberton Township and California, was arrested following a traffic stop in Mount Holly in 2010, when an officer found a pound brick of pot in the trunk of his rental car. [continues 738 words]
As the new year starts, Chris Clement, the commissioner of the Department of Transportation, brings the obvious to our eyes. As the Concord Monitor reports: "The number of "red-listed" state bridges is 145 and climbing. He'll begin 2016 with a $48 million deficit in the highway fund. Thirty-seven percent of the state's roads are in poor condition. And while plenty of lawmakers say they want to finish improvements to Interstate 93, they've put $0 toward the $250 million bill." [continues 568 words]
GREENVILLE, Ill. - A lifer with a pen sat in the 65-square-foot cell he shares. A calendar taunted from a bulletin board. He began to write. Dear President Obama. He acknowledged his criminal past. He expressed remorse. And he pleaded for a second chance, now that he had served 18 years of the worst sentence short of execution: life without parole, for a nonviolent first offense. Mr. President, he wrote, you are my final hope. Sincerely, Jesse Webster. Eleven-hundred men reside in medium security at a remote federal prison in Greenville in southern Illinois. Most come and go, sentences served. Others stay, their legal appeals exhausted, their only hope to take up a pen and enter the long-shot lottery of executive clemency with a salutation that begins: Dear President Obama. [continues 517 words]
The State Is Already Amending the Pot Law, So It Should Do This, Too In October, The Stranger broke the news that state regulators had a plan to repeal most of Washington State's voter-approved 1998 medical marijuana law, a deal that included prohibiting patients from growing plants at home. Patients voiced outrage, of course. The state liquor board, which was in on the strategy, has since taken a baby step backward, suggesting patients could grow three mature plants instead of the 15 currently allowed. [continues 327 words]
Jeff Mizanskey has sat behind bars for twenty years. His only hope of getting out is clemency from the governor. On a dark rural highway, a week before Christmas in 1993, two Hispanic males barreled east through Missouri in a 1978 Mercury Cougar. Stashed in the trunk was nearly 100 pounds of marijuana. "Since I've been here in prison, I've met lots of people in for murder, rape, robberies, all kinds of violent crimes. I've seen a lot of them go home on parole. Don't I ever get a chance?" [continues 850 words]
North Bonneville Supporters Hope Pioneering Move Will Guarantee Control and Generate Revenue Many cities in Washington state are trying to ban or block new state-regulated pot stores. North Bonneville, population 1,005, is not one of them. A city some see as a Chevron station just west of the Columbia River's Bridge of the Gods, North Bonneville not only wants a pot store - it wants to own a pot store. Mayor Don Stevens figures that would give the Skamania County city more control of a store they're likely to get anyway - and more revenue. [continues 1364 words]