Obama commutes sentences of 95, pardons 2 in year-end spree

[Draggingtree]

Accuracy in Media:

Obama commutes sentences of 95, pardons 2 in year-end spree

 

By ERIC TUCKERDecember 18, 2015 4:27 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama on Friday commuted the sentences of 95 prisoners and pardoned two more, part of an ongoing effort within the White House to rethink a criminal justice system that critics say has resulted in overly harsh and expensive punishment for thousands of drug offenders.

 

The commutations, the most Obama has issued at one time, mostly benefit nonviolent drug offenders — including many who were given life sentences for crack and cocaine crimes, and some who have already spent more than two decades behind bars.

 

The White House also pardoned an Ohio man sentenced to probation in a counterfeiting case and a Virginia woman sentenced to home detention and supervised release in a bank fraud case.

[Draggingtree]

The Case for Clemency

 

To forgive prisoners is divine—or as close as government gets.

 

By CHASE MADAR • December 21, 2015

You’ve probably heard the statistic too many times already: we are 5 percent of the world’s population but home to 25 percent of its prisoners. The land of the free has for decades now been the world’s greatest incarcerator, in both rate and absolute numbers, more likely to lock people up than authoritarian states like China, Russia, Cuba, Egypt, or Iran.

 

At the federal level—which only accounts for about 12 percent of U.S. prisoners—mild sentencing reform has both bipartisan support and bipartisan resistance in the Senate. Looking to the states, a much hyped “moment” of criminal-justice reform is more than countervailed by the deeply ingrained punitive habits of governors and legislatures across the land, from Massachusetts, whose liberal governor signed a tough “three strikes” law in 2012, to Louisiana, where Bobby Jindal upped penalties for heroin-related offenses.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-case-for-clemency/