Tag: Department of Justice

President Biden orders DOJ to facilitate voting for people in federal custody or under supervision

On election day in 2016, Crystal Mason, a Texas mother of three, cast a provisional ballot. She was unaware that Texas considered her ineligible to vote because she was on federal supervised release at the time. Six months later she was arrested. A year and a half later, she was convicted of voter fraud and sentenced to five years in prison. Mason, who is Black, believes that her prosecution was “politically and racially charged.” An appeals court upheld the conviction, ruling that whether Mason knew she was ineligible to vote was irrelevant to the case against her. She is pursuing…

Read more

Bids Sought for National Clean Slate Clearinghouse

Last November President Obama announced plans to create a National Clean Slate Clearinghouse, a joint project between the Departments of Labor and Justice that would “build capacity for legal services needed to help with record-cleaning, expungement, and related civil legal services.”  In late February the Labor Department announced plans for a large-scale contract to establish the Clearinghouse, and sought information from likely bidders.  Since then, we have been curious about what the scope of the Clearinghouse project would be. Now we know. This past Monday the Department of Labor issued an official solicitation for bids to develop the Clearinghouse, with…

Read more

The “president’s idle executive power” and collateral consequences

In their Washington Post op ed on the President’s neglect of his pardon power posted earlier on this site, Rachel Barkow and Mark Osler are critical of the Justice Department’s bureaucratic process for processing applications for executive clemency, which they argue takes a very long time and yields very little.  (The New York Times editorialized last year in a similar vein about how DOJ has effectively sidelined the president’s power as a tool for justice for more than 20 years.)  Barkow and Osler ask why Justice considered it necessary or wise to farm out the processing of thousands of petitions from federal prisoners…

Read more