Obama gave the warning earlier this year. He also has collaborated with an outside agency on who and why he commutes their sentences.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama plans to grant clemency to federal offenders “more aggressively” during the remainder of his presidency, he said in a sit-down interview with The Huffington Post on Friday.
Obama has faced criticism for rarely using his power to grant pardons and commutations. In December, he commuted the sentences of eight federal drug offenders, including four who had been sentenced to life. That brought his total number of commutations to 18.
Obama said he had granted clemency so infrequently because of problems in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney. The former head of that office, who was appointed during the George W. Bush administration, resigned in April amid criticism from criminal justice advocates.
“I noticed that what I was getting was mostly small-time crimes from very long ago,” Obama said. “It’d be a 65-year-old who wanted a pardon to get his gun rights back. Most of them were legitimate, but they didn’t address the broader issues that we face, particularly around nonviolent drug offenses. So we’ve revamped now the DOJ office. We’re now getting much more representative applicants.”
Many of those new applications came from what’s known as the Clemency Project 2014, announced when the head of the Office of the Pardon Attorney resigned. That project, which operates independently of the government, is intended to help DOJ sort through a huge number of applicants to figure out who meets specific criteria laid out by the administration.
4 of the 95 Prisoners Obama Just Set Free Had Nothing to Do With Drug Sentences
On Friday, President Obama granted clemency to 95 convicted prisoners. The vast majority of these individuals received harsh sentences for relatively minor drug offenses. Most of them will become free men and women on April 16, 2016.
Speaking to the press, Obama said:
“Earlier today, I commuted the sentences of 95 men and women who had served their debt to society – another step forward in upholding our fundamental ideals of justice and fairness.”
While they were referred to by the media as “drug offenders,” four of the men and women included were not punished for anything having to do with drugs. Here is some background on these “Freed Four.”
George Andre Axam
Crime: possession of a firearm by a convicted felon
Sentence: 15 years in prison
Though Axam had a history of drug abuse and felony offenses, the crime for which he was imprisoned occurred in December of 2001.
After arguing with his daughter outside his Atlanta house, Axam went back inside, retrieved a gun, then went outside and reportedly aimed it at his daughter’s boyfriend, who was sitting in a car. Axam proceeded to fire “one of two shots in [the boyfriend’s] direction,” then fled into the woods when the police came after him.
Carolyn Yvonne Butler
Crime: Three counts each of armed bank robbery and using a firearm during a violent crime
Sentence: 48 years in prison
Butler robbed three banks at gunpoint in 1991 – one on June 4, another on July 10, and the third on November 22. She reportedly purchased a .25 caliber pistol in San Antonio two days before the first crime.
Though she appealed her guilty verdicts, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld her convictions.
Jon Dylan Girard
Crime: Counterfeiting
Sentence: Six months of home confinement and three years probation
Girard, a physician in Dayton, Ohio, was convicted of counterfeiting in 2002. He was granted a full pardon by the President.
Melody Eileen Homa (née Childress)
Crime: Aiding and abetting bank fraud
Sentence: Thirty days of home confinement, three years probation, 200 hours of community service
Homa committed her crime way back in 1991. Like Girard, the presidential pardon expunged the bank fraud charges from her record.
It’s unclear why these four individuals were tapped for sentence commutation or pardon. Obama has now granted clemency to a total of 163 prisoners in 2015.
