Monday, February 10, 2014
Thank you, NY Times!
From today's lead editorial in the New York Times:
The founders understood very well that there could be miscarriages of justice even under the rule of law. By allowing the president to commute unjust sentences or pardon deserving petitioners who had served their time, they sought to ensure that the workings of the courts could be tempered with mercy.
...
The Justice Department’s sudden interest in the clemency problem is good news, but asking defense lawyers for help is a haphazard approach. What’s needed is wholesale reform of the department’s pardon office, which has proved itself ineffective and incompetent, partly because the current process relies on the department to evaluate its own work.
One sound idea is to create a clemency review panel outside the Justice Department, perhaps as a part of the executive office. Mr. Obama could form an advisory board, or reconfigure the pardon office to include defense lawyers, sociologists and other experts who would bring a broader perspective to the issue. The goal would be to give the president unbiased information that would enable him to exercise fully this important aspect of executive power.
And what I wrote last week on MSNBC:
The framers created the pardon power to offset congressional excesses, and that is exactly how this president, unlike former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, is using it.
....
Rationally, generating more clemency petitions only makes sense if this administration is prepared to find a way to analyze and ultimately grant more petitions. If that is part of the plan – and it might be – Cole did not mention it in his speech.
There are good options for increasing the size of the pipe, and producing more good outcomes rather than just more petitions.
Critics hailing from such diverse corners as the Heritage Foundation and the American Constitution Society have called for wide-ranging reform of the pardon process. This might be the time to implement significant changes, such as removing many levels of review and giving the person or committee charged with making recommendations on clemency much more frequent and direct access to the president.
The founders understood very well that there could be miscarriages of justice even under the rule of law. By allowing the president to commute unjust sentences or pardon deserving petitioners who had served their time, they sought to ensure that the workings of the courts could be tempered with mercy.
...
The Justice Department’s sudden interest in the clemency problem is good news, but asking defense lawyers for help is a haphazard approach. What’s needed is wholesale reform of the department’s pardon office, which has proved itself ineffective and incompetent, partly because the current process relies on the department to evaluate its own work.
One sound idea is to create a clemency review panel outside the Justice Department, perhaps as a part of the executive office. Mr. Obama could form an advisory board, or reconfigure the pardon office to include defense lawyers, sociologists and other experts who would bring a broader perspective to the issue. The goal would be to give the president unbiased information that would enable him to exercise fully this important aspect of executive power.
And what I wrote last week on MSNBC:
The framers created the pardon power to offset congressional excesses, and that is exactly how this president, unlike former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, is using it.
....
Rationally, generating more clemency petitions only makes sense if this administration is prepared to find a way to analyze and ultimately grant more petitions. If that is part of the plan – and it might be – Cole did not mention it in his speech.
There are good options for increasing the size of the pipe, and producing more good outcomes rather than just more petitions.
Critics hailing from such diverse corners as the Heritage Foundation and the American Constitution Society have called for wide-ranging reform of the pardon process. This might be the time to implement significant changes, such as removing many levels of review and giving the person or committee charged with making recommendations on clemency much more frequent and direct access to the president.
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Everybody should be as lucky to have an input that has such a meaningful impact. It looks like the task immediate to that of setting in place an effective clemency review panel is a call for reform of the system that created this crisis in the first place. It sounds daunting tough, given that it would have to tackle a system that has huge momentum and is mired by innumerable ramifications.
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