‘Make the most of this’: Obama commutes sentences of 95 prisoners in 1 day, pardons 2 more
RT.com
19 Dec, 2015
On Thursday, 95 federal inmates received clemency orders from President Barack Obama. The single day total is more than half of all commutations by Obama to date, but criminal justice reform advocates have had mixed reactions to the president’s pace.
“I am granting your application because you have demonstrated the potential to turn your life around,” Obama wrote in 95 separately signed letters. “Now it is up to you to make the most of this opportunity.”
Closing his seventh year in the White House, Obama can count a total of 184 convicts that had their sentences cut short by virtue of his clemency power. However, prior to Thursday, only 89 people had received leniency.
Of the 95 cases commuted on Thursday, all but two involved drug crimes, mostly for cocaine or crack possession. Forty of the 93 drug-related cases would have been life sentences. In the two non-drug-related cases, a Texas woman will serve half of her 48-year mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery, which she began serving in 1992, and a Georgia man will only spend nine years of a 15-year sentence in prison for possessing a firearm with a prior felony.
The two pardons went to an Ohio physician convicted of counterfeiting in 2002 and a Virginia woman convicted of aiding and abetting bank fraud in 1991.
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