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New York Times
FOR more than four decades, Sala Udin lived under the shadow of a federal firearms conviction, the result of a search by the Kentucky police who found an unloaded shotgun in the trunk of his car in 1970.
Udin, who had been a Freedom Rider during the civil rights era, carried the gun for protection as he drove around the South. After eight months in prison, he lived an exemplary life, serving on the Pittsburgh City Council and playing a role in the city's redevelopment. But when President Obama visited Pittsburgh in 2009, Udin wasn't allowed to meet him: His criminal record prevented such an encounter.
Last month, Obama issued Udin a pardon one of just 148 pardons the president has granted during his two terms in office. It is an abysmally low number for a president who has stressed his commitment to second chances and the importance of helping convicted people re-enter society.
The White House has been trumpeting Obama's use of his clemency power in the last two years, especially his nearly 1,200 commutations of prison sentences, more than the last several presidents combined. Most of these inmates were serving outrageously long terms, including life without parole, for nonviolent drug crimes. Commuting those sentences is meaningful progress, even if Obama could and should have started much earlier and released thousands more deserving people.
But when it comes to the other type of executive clemency pardons Obama hasn't been an improvement over his predecessors. Unlike a commutation, which shortens or ends a prison sentence, a pardon is an act of forgiveness granted to someone who has completed a sentence.
Pardons remove the stigma of conviction and restore the right to hold office, to vote, to obtain certain business licences and to own a gun all activities that can be denied those with criminal records.
For almost everyone with a criminal conviction, a pardon is the only path back to full citizenship. Throughout most of American history, presidents granted them liberally. Obama is a different story. He took office with more than 800 pending pardon requests. During his presidency he received almost 3,400 more. He denied more than 1,600 and closed 500 others without taking any action. So he will leave office with roughly 2,000 pending requests on his desk an embarrassing record that isn't excused by the similarly poor showings of other recent presidents.
The reluctance to grant pardons makes even less sense than a reluctance to give out commutations, since the sentences have already been served and there is no public safety concern.
In both cases, the trouble rests with the people acting as the gatekeepers of mercy.
The clemency process is run out of the Justice Department, where career prosecutors have little interest in reversing the work of their colleagues. It's a recipe for intransigence, dysfunction and injustice on a mass scale.
Obama understands the problem, even if he didn't fix it. As he wrote in an article published in this month's issue of The Harvard Law Review, the process operates like a lottery, making it hard to tell what distinguishes the few lucky applicants who get clemency from the many deserving ones who don't.
There is a better way. In both liberal and conservative states, from Delaware and Connecticut to Nebraska and Georgia, the pardon process is more predictable and transparent. Some states require independent boards to make pardon recommendations to the governor; others hold regularly scheduled public hearings. All take the executive's job of granting mercy seriously, which makes those grants both more fair and more common.
On Obama's first Inauguration Day, in 2009, President George W Bush gave him a good piece of advice: Pick a pardon policy and stick with it. Perhaps President-elect Donald Trump will learn from Obama's failure to heed that wisdom.
