Obama commutes drug sentences for 22 federal prisoners

President Obama commuted the prison sentences of 22 people convicted of committing crimes associated with drug deals gone awry — a decision that sparked public criticism from advocates who say the government is not doing enough to exonerate victims of a broken prison system and others saying it is giving criminals too much leniency.

Eight of the 22 criminals whom Mr. Obama tapped for clemency Tuesday were serving life in prison. Most of the criminals were convicted of selling crack cocaine, and others were charged with intent to distribute methamphetamine.

The president’s action will liberate all but one of them from their prison cells by the end of July.

In Mr. Obama’s first presidential term, he commuted only one sentence. He has picked up the pace dramatically in his second term, commuting the sentences of 43 convicts in a little more than two years. President George W. Bush commuted 11 sentences during his two terms in office.

Clemency advocates say Mr. Obama is making poor progress in correcting a broken prison system that has nearly 3 million inmates and costs taxpayers billions of dollars to hold them.

“We have 219,000 people in federal prison,” said John Webster, managing director of National Prison and Sentencing Consultants Inc. “Approximately 57 percent of them are there on drug charges. He released 22. Thank you for those 22 — and I’m happy for those 22 — but he needs a few more zeroes after those 22 to make things right.”

Others say Mr. Obama is making a mockery of the judicial process in his effort to empty the prisons. A few hours after the president announced his plan, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton used Twitter to accuse Mr. Obama of “abusing clemency to empty jails with help of outside leftist groups.”

Mr. Obama in 2010 signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the disparity of prison terms for crack cocaine offenses compared with crimes involving the powder form of cocaine. Before the act, the law meted out equivalent sentences for 1 gram of crack cocaine as 100 grams of powder cocaine.

That provision led to an increased number of black inmates because crack cocaine users tend to be poor and black, and powder cocaine users tend to be upper-class and white.

Four years later, the Department of Justice announced a commutation drive aimed primarily at trimming the sentences of people serving long prison terms for trafficking in crack cocaine.

“There are more low-level, nonviolent drug offenders who remain in prison and who would likely have received a substantially lower sentence if convicted of precisely the same offenses today,” James Cole, then the deputy attorney general, said in a speech last year in New York. “This is not fair, and it harms our criminal justice system.”

Still, the drive to commute more prisoners has drawn the ire of Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, who is exploring the formal arrangement between the Justice Department and advocacy groups pushing for the leniency. Mr. Grassley has stated that the number of people in federal prison for merely possessing drugs is near zero.

But Mr. Obama’s decision feels like vindication for people like Lawrence Elmo Scott, who was convicted of selling $10 worth of crack cocaine at a convenience store near a middle school in Lynchburg, Virginia, in September 2002.

Court documents show that Scott has been trying to convince the courts to re-examine his case for a decade. He began his campaign for freedom two years after receiving in April 2003 a prison sentence of 23 years and five months, with six years of supervised release.

Although court documents depict him as a “career offender” with an extensive criminal history for conspiracy to distribute heroin and cocaine, Scott contends that his sentence is “cruel, unusual and unreasonable compared to lesser sentences imposed in other cases for a greater amount of the same form of narcotic.”

That is because the system — which fails to address its incarcerated citizens with the education, rehabilitation and treatment — is broken, Mr. Webster said.

“The war on drugs has been a disaster,” he said. “It is a disaster.”

The war on drugs took off in the 1980s because of the crack cocaine epidemic, said Dayle Carson, a former deputy probation officer who now works as a correctional consultant for Sentencing Experts. Since that time, the drug war has driven Congress toward drawing up legislation that disproportionately punishes the underdog, he said.

“Part of this clemency process is the administration recognizing that some people were unfairly sentenced based on these mandatory minimums,” he said.

Some advocates expressed gratitude to Mr. Obama in the hours after he made public his decision to commute the 22 prisoners. A small change to a broken system is still a welcome change among those who are striving to shine a light on its victims, said Clemency Project 2014 Project Manager Cynthia Roseberry.

“I cannot express in stronger terms how gratifying it is to see today’s grants of clemency by the White House, including in cases where some of Clemency Project 2014’s more than 1,500 volunteer lawyers had supported clemency,” she said. “At the Project, I hear every day from prisoners and their loved ones who for the first time in many years have hope. For far too long, this nation went down the road of locking up nonviolent offenders and throwing away the keys, without any regard for value of these people and the damage that mass incarceration does to families, communities and to our entire society.”