Lots of (surprising and unsurprising) clemency chatter ... and great advocacy for clemency change

The lame-duck end of a presidential (or gubernatorial) term is often a time for lots of discussion of clemency possibilities.  And who follows this space surely sensibly expected that the Term of Prez Trump would wind down with plenty of clemency chatter.  But, as detailed via these recent headlines and links, the array of stories afoot are remarkable:

From Business Insider, "Joe Exotic's lawyer thinks he's 'very, very close' to getting a presidential pardon from Trump"

From the New York Times, "Trump Has Discussed With Advisers Pardons for His 3 Eldest Children and Giuliani"

From NPR, "Justice Department Investigating Possible Bribery-For-Pardon Scheme"

Though I might have "hot takes" about the latest clemency news, the recent piece most worth considering in this space comes from Emily Galvin-Almanza via The Appeal under the headline "Biden Must Fix The Broken Executive Clemency Process.  This Is Who He Should Select To Lead That Effort."  Here are excerpts:

[W]e must work at all levels to transform our criminal legal system.  But we can’t neglect powerful, fast tools like clemency.  We shouldn’t box clemency away as merely some form of mercy, when in fact it is something much more akin to a high-speed mechanism for undoing the worst impacts of bad, outdated policy and enforcement choices.  And yet, we have done exactly that: As [Rachel] Barkow has pointed out, we’ve taken this powerful tool and abandoned it in a dusty closet somewhere in the basement of the Department of Justice.  That’s where a brave new Administration must begin....

As you might expect, this choking process has left clemency in a state of crisis.  It is dysfunctional, available primarily to the powerful, and raises only false hopes for marginalized people. But we are standing, post-election, on the verge of tremendous change.  Looking to a Biden Administration that, at its core, has indicated a commitment to righting the wrongs of the past and looking for smarter, more human (and humane) solutions.  Clemency is a fantastic opportunity for such an administration: fixing clemency in a way that would spur transformative change doesn’t require congress, doesn’t require massive bureaucracy, and doesn’t require anything other than strong executive action–and an executive ready to leverage the unique depths of his own empathy.

The process is simple: first, the new President Joe Biden must move the clemency process out of DOJ and into the White House, and appoint someone with deep grounding in the topic–and bipartisan credibility–to lead a committee on clemency that would not only build a system to process individual applications faster, but create proactive tactics for finding ways to use the clemency power to undo the worst impacts of bad, carceral law–even for people who hadn’t been able to file for relief on their own.  Best of all, this idea isn’t particularly controversial: it was supported during the primary by everyone from Senators Amy Klobuchar to Bernie Sanders, it made it through the Biden-Sanders Unity Taskforce, and it was integrated into the 2020 Democratic Party platform.  For context, this makes it significantly less controversial than, say, legalizing marijuana — a policy many, many states are already enacting.

Rachel Barkow, of course, would be a very smart choice, as someone whose primary body of work has focused on building a better clemency system, and who has also been celebrated by advocates from across the political spectrum.  She’s not only a respected scholar and former clerk to the iconic Justice Scalia, she’s a national policy player who has been through Senate confirmation once already, joining the U.S. Sentencing Commission in 2013.  But importantly, her views aren’t limited to the ivory tower — she’s done the actual work of helping people apply for clemency: she and co-author Mark Osler started a “pop up” clemency clinic to help people apply for clemency in 2014....

Leading a team that would not just include but center the experiences of people who had lived through incarceration, and also reserve space for public defenders, civil rights lawyers, and progressive prosecutors who carry a more modern understanding of second chances than their old-school peers, Barkow could hand the President a mechanism for fostering liberty, opportunity and restoration out of the wreckage of our bloated system.  She could change the game by building a faster, smarter process.  For people who love comparisons, Barkow’s role in the clemency conversation is not dissimilar from the robust academic-yet-tactical power Senator Elizabeth Warren has brought to the conversation around the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  Tasking Barkow with bringing clemency into the White House would be a little like letting Sen. Warren supercharge the CFPB.

Instead of placing endless barriers between deserving, promising people and their chance to be heard, or allowing prosecutorial dinosaurs at DOJ to stand between ordinary people and opportunity, she and her committee could fast-track applications and give President Biden an opportunity to be a groundbreaking leader in this area.  They could seek out specific areas where we know sentences are too long and out of step with current enforcement priorities and find people who may not have had the capacity to file a petition, but whose sentence is wildly out of step with modern views. It would be especially beautiful to break down the legacy of 1994 — and 1990s punitive measures more generally — with this unique and deceptively simple action.