How about some clemency grants from Prez Biden while his team works on grander clemency plans?

I am very pleased to see this lengthy new Politico piece shining a light on federal clemency under this full headline: "Trump left behind a clemency mess.  The clock’s ticking for Biden to solve it. Lawyers and criminal justice advocates are pushing Biden to act swiftly.  But Covid and the economy are pushing action back."  I recommend the whole piece, and here are excerpts:

Biden’s White House counsel’s office has started to reach out to attorneys and advocates for suggestions on reforms, what could be done about the backlog, and mistakes they believe were made in previous administrations, according to the people familiar with the conversations.  Roy Austin, an Obama administration veteran who served on the Biden transition team on Justice Department issues, has spoken to advocates as well.  Biden’s new adviser on criminal justice issues at the Domestic Policy Council, Chiraag Bains, is expected to play a role too, according to two people familiar with the situation.

But the White House has revealed little about its own plans. And attorneys and advocates still worry that Biden’s team lacks a comprehensive plan for dealing with the enormous backlog.  Perhaps for good reason: A former Obama aide said that while Biden’s team is familiar with the clemency problems it faces, it has been too busy with nominations, executive orders and proposed legislation, including those designed to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and cratered economy.  “They couldn’t have had time to formulate a plan,” the person said.

More than 100 progressive groups working on criminal justice issues are urging Biden to overhaul the arduous clemency process and start resolving cases right away.  One of them, the ACLU, launched an ad campaign to push him to grant clemency to 25,000 people and make good on his pledge to tackle criminal justice issues amid a national reckoning on racial injustice.  Among those who have met with Biden’s team are Cynthia Roseberry, deputy director of policy at the American Civil Liberties Union's Justice Division, and Nkechi Taifa, convener of the Justice Roundtable, an umbrella organization on criminal justice issues....

“The time to figure out how to do this should’ve been during the transition,” said Mark Osler, a former federal prosecutor who serves as a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis who is pushing for a change. “The danger is that they’ll replicate the mistake the past several administrations have done of never focusing on it until it’s too late and it’s a mess.”

The White House did not respond to questions but released a statement. “President Biden has laid out an ambitious agenda to address problems in our criminal justice system that have resulted in overincarceration and miscarriages of justice, and he has a talented team of attorneys working to examine appeals for clemency to ensure sentences are consistent with the values he’s articulated,” White House spokesman Michael Gwin said.

In modern history, presidents have treated clemency as an afterthought, granting it in their waning days, often as a gift to friends and associates. Trump was no exception and took that a step further. In most cases, Trump bypassed the lengthy, multilevel process for clemency that has been conducted for more than a century. Instead, he made decisions through an ad hoc system where politically connected allies and well-paid lobbyists tried to persuade him in person and on TV to use pardons to help friends and hurt enemies.

In total, Trump granted 237 pardons or commutations and denied 180 cases. Many of those he acted on were headline-grabbing: former members of Congress, numerous people convicted in Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia’s 2016 election interference, and security contractors convicted for massacring Iraqi civilians in 2008. He failed to act on thousands of other cases, leaving 13,750 behind for Biden. But the current backlog — the largest on record, according to the Justice Department and experts — can’t be blamed on Trump alone.

Barack Obama waited well into his second term to act. When he urged federal prisoners to apply for leniency under his clemency initiative, which allowed certain inmates to make their case for getting their sentences commuted, petitions soared. He received more than 36,000 requests, the largest total of any president on record. And he acted on an historic amount — more than 22,000 cases — granting clemency 1,927 times, including 212 pardons and 1,715 commutations.

But Obama didn’t take care of all the pending cases, leaving behind 13,000 of them when he left office. And when his final pardon attorney, Deborah Leff, resigned in January of Obama’s final year in office, she lamented that the clemency initiative didn’t have enough resources. “In his clemency initiative, President Obama focused significant resources on identifying inmates, most of them people of color, who had been sentenced to excessive and draconian sentences,” said Neil Eggleston, who served as White House counsel for Obama. “The president would have liked to clear the backlog in pending petitions, but resources spent in achieving that goal would have resulted in fewer inmates who were serving those excessive sentences for relatively minor drug crimes being released.”...

Obama’s aides say they began talking about the pardon process during the transition but they didn’t take Bush’s advice because they had other priorities, including health care. Advocates and lawyers hope Biden learns the lessons of history and makes clemency a first term priority.

“We hope he’ll break from what folks have done in the past and do things at the last minute or as a gift,” Roseberry said. “Our position is it should be used now and as much as necessary to correct all of the wrongs that we now acknowledge from our past criminal legal system. ... It takes courage to do it this year.  We are ready for this.  It’s time. It’s past time.”

Biden didn’t campaign aggressively on the issue of clemency. But supporters of his and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) did address the topic in its 110-page list of recommendations designed to try to unite the two camps ahead of the November election. One of the main proposals that the task force put forward also is one of priorities of criminal justice reform advocates: the creation of an independent clemency board.

The Biden-Sanders task force proposed a 60-person agency composed of people with diverse backgrounds to review cases.  The Democratic Party’s 2020 platform, likewise, called for an independent clemency commission, taking the process out of the Justice Department, which, some activists argue, is ill-suited to submit clemency recommendations to the White House since it also prosecutes the cases.

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), who chairs the House Judiciary subcommittee with jurisdiction over pardons, lobbied Obama and Trump to issue more pardons. He said he plans to do the same for Biden. “There are ... more and more people in jail, and a lot of those people have been there forever and they have been there for long draconian sentences,” Cohen said. “They’re basically wasting their lives, wasting the federal government’s finances ... and destroying lives and families. It’s a total loser, but we do it.”

Regular readers will not be surprised to hear me endorse the sentiments of Cynthia Roseberry, namely that "It’s time. It’s past time."  I also share Mark Osler's view that this could have and should have been a transition priority for the Biden team.  Still, I am not inclined to aggressively criticize the Biden Administration if it currently has advisers and insiders talking to and working with advocates about how to put together a "comprehensive plan" for effective clemency reform.  But, as the title of this post is meant to highlight, taking a careful and deliberative process toward grander reform of the entire clemency process should not be an excuse for Prez Biden to hold back entirely on the use of his clemency pen.

I am certain that there must be many dozens, and probably many hundreds, of cases that ought to be federal clemency "no-brainers."  (For example, women and men on the CAN-DO site or the lifer marijuana offenders assembled at Life for Pot or person highlighted by NACDL’s Trial Penalty Clemency Project.)  I am pretty confident that only a relatively little amount of time would be needed for members of the Biden team to identify at least a handful of compelling cases that could and should allow clemency grants to be part of Prez Biden's 100-day agenda and legacy.  As Senator Cohen highlights, every day of delay is another day "wasting their lives, wasting the federal government’s finances, and destroying lives and families."

A few of many recent related posts:

• ACLU urging Prez Biden to "use his clemency powers to bring home 25,000 people" from federal prisons 
• Why not a clemency push focused on the (more lethal) new death penalty that is COVID in federal prisons?
• A challenge for those troubled by Trump's final month clemencies: identify dozens, hundreds of comparable cases for Biden's first month
• Reviewing CJUTF Recommendations: when and how might Biden Administration create an independent clemency board?