A Justice Department push to shorten long drug sentences through President Obama's clemency powers has gotten off to a slow start: Obama has commuted the sentences of just two of the tens of thousands of federal inmates who have applied through the program. Lawyers involved in the effort say the year-old clemency initiative has been hampered by the complexity of the cases and questions about the eligibility criteria, which may still be too strict to help most of the prison population. The result is a system that appears even more backlogged than it was before the initiative began. "The criteria basically suggest that a whole bunch of good citizens who committed one little mistake got significantly more than 10 years in prison, and fortunately that's pretty rare," said Johanna Markind, a former attorney-adviser in the Office of Pardon Attorney who left in March. "I think they've kind of belatedly realized that people are doing their jobs, and those perfect cases they think are there don't really exist," she said. "For all the sound and fury about the commutations, the clemency initiative has only come up with a handful of cases that fit" the criteria. The clemency initiative was intended to help federal inmates who would have received shorter prison terms had they been sentenced today. That applies mostly to drug offenders after Congress shortened sentences for crack cocaine in 2010. To be eligible, inmates must have already served 10 years of their sentence. Last year, a record 6,561 federal prisoners � three times the usual number � filed petitions with the Justice Department's Office of Pardon Attorney, which advises the president on all requests for clemency. Under the constitution, the president has the absolute power to grant pardons and commute sentences. More than 30,000 federal inmates applied for representation through the Clemency Project 2014, a consortium of lawyers who have volunteered to help eligible inmates through the often complicated and time-consuming process of seeking a commutation. But 13 months later, those lawyers have submitted just 31 petitions. And while Obama has used his pardon power to shorten the sentences of 43, most of those cases predate the clemency initiative. Over six years, Obama has granted just 0.2% of the commutation petitions submitted.
USA TODAY
Obama to release 22 drug offenders in clemency push The Justice Department says it expects to recommend more commutations to Obama as it reviews the petitions. But that could take a while: In its 2016 budget request to Congress, the department said the deluge of clemency applications is too much for the current staff to manage. "As OPA's existing staff has discovered, expending the substantial resources required simply to manage such a volume of clemency requests significantly decreases those available for analyzing and evaluating the merits of individual applications and preparing the appropriate letters of advice to inform the president," the Justice Department said in its congressional budget justification. Obama has proposed a 66% budget increase for the Office of Pardon Attorney in 2016, and is seeking twice as many lawyers to process all the paperwork. And that paperwork can be daunting, requiring an examination of trial transcripts, the pre-sentence report (which is often sealed) and Bureau of Prisons files. To be eligible under the program, inmates must be low-level offenders with no ties to gangs or cartels. They must have demonstrated good conduct in prison, have no significant criminal history and no history of violence. "There are gray areas, What is 'demonstrated good conduct in prison,' for example? Is that a pristine record?" said Cynthia Roseberry, a career public defender who now manages the Clemency Project 2014. | 
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