"Why isn’t Mr. Obama exercising his pardon power?"

The title of this post is a question that regular readers know I have been asking for years.  It is also the headline of this Washington Post editorial, which includes these excerpts:

A report from the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General rightly takes the Obama administration to task for moving at a snail’s pace to answer the pleas of thousands of inmates seeking clemency or pardon.

The report notes that significant delays occur at virtually every step of the pardon process...  But the greatest share of the blame for the slow speed resides with the White House.  Mr. Obama did not issue a single pardon for nearly the first two years of his presidency.  Once Justice Department recommendations are forwarded to the White House, they languish an average of nine months before the president acts. The administration has recently made headway in reducing the backlog of cases — from 4,700 to 2,000 — but only because it denied thousands of petitions.

While more timely processing is needed, the real travesty involves the president’s miserly use of his pardon power.  Pardon is often an inmate’s last best chance for justice. It is meant to correct wrongs left unaddressed by the courts or legislature, and should be used wisely but unsparingly to give a second chance to those who have been wrongly convicted or sentenced to disproportionately and unjustifiably long prison terms.  

Mr. Obama has thus far extended mercy to a mere 17 individuals, most of whom committed relatively minor offenses decades ago....  

Mr. Obama need only look to the thousands of Americans — many of them young, African American men — incarcerated for inexcusably lengthy periods because of draconian crack cocaine laws.  Mr. Obama joined with a bipartisan coalition in Congress to reduce the penalties and make them more proportional to the crime.  Some inmates may benefit from a U.S. Sentencing Commission decision this summer that allows judges to resentence inmates under new guidelines reflecting the penalty reductions.  But many nonviolent offenders worthy of relief will be out of luck because they were sentenced to mandatory minimum prison terms.  This is exactly the kind of situation that cries out for presidential intervention.

Some recent and older related posts: 

• Updated numbers on President Obama's disgraceful clemency record
• "Obama's Mercy Dearth"
• Los Angeles Times calls out our "no-pardon president"
• "A no-pardon Justice Department"
• Fascinating report on backstory behind presidential pardon problems
• DOJ resisting efforts to disinfect the federal celemency process with some sunlight
• "Grandmother Will Mark President's Day By Petitioning Obama To Commute Her 27-Year Prison Sentence For Non-Violent Crime"
• Effective USA Today coverage of President Obama's clemency stinginess
• "Obama should exercise the pardon power"
• NYTimes op-ed assailing Obama's pathetic pardon practices
• DOJ audit of federal clemency process with sound and fury signifying nothing