Celebrating Ten Years of The Clemency Project

By Mary Price

This past Sunday, February 18, marked the ten-year anniversary of the founding of Clemency Project 2014. I and representatives from other organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), met at the Justice Department with then-Deputy Attorney General James Cole. He told us about a new clemency initiative that President Barack Obama intended to implement. The initiative aimed to locate and advance commutation petitions for eligible people incarcerated in the federal Bureau of Prisons who had served at least ten years of a term that would have been lower had they been sentenced at the time they petitioned for early release.

This was an amazing opportunity. Clemency is extremely rare, and incarcerated people who receive it do so with chances more akin to winning the lottery than receiving a benefit dictated by policy. So when we were asked at the meeting if our organizations could help, we said, “Yes.”

FAMM, NACDL, the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section, the ACLU, and the Federal Public and Community Defenders all came together for this opportunity to help incarcerated people serving unjust sentences. Dozens of law firms and hundreds of lawyers, paralegals and federal public defenders worked with our team.

By the time President Obama left office, he had granted commutations to 1,715 people, including more than 550 people serving life without parole. The average sentence reduction was 140 months. Roughly half of those whose sentences were commuted were represented by attorneys recruited, trained, and supported by Clemency Project 2014.

The Clemency Project transformed the lives of people who received commutations and the lawyers who helped them, many of whom told me that representing a clemency applicant was the most rewarding work of their legal career. All of us who worked on the Project were forever changed by our experience.

Ten years later, our work is unfinished. As then-Attorney General Eric Holder observed in 2014, “Certain types of cases result in too many Americans going to prison for too long, and at times for no truly good public safety reason.” That remains the case today. I’m proud of what Clemency Project 2014 accomplished, but am keenly aware that we must keep moving forward on true criminal justice reform in our country.

Mary Price is FAMM’s General Counsel.