Author Archives: CCRC Staff

“Poised to commute dozens of sentences, Obama remains the ‘Scrooge’ of pardons”

SalaYahoo News has published a piece by its chief investigative reporter Michael Isikoff commenting on how few pardons President Obama has granted, and how backed up the Justice Department’s pardon office seems to be.  He illustrates the problem of presidential inaction with the case of Sala Udin, a Pittsburgh community activist and former City Council member, whose application for pardon of a 1970 firearms conviction has been awaiting decision for several years. Isikoff reports that while the President is likely to issue a number of sentence commutations this week, no pardons will be forthcoming. This leaves the 800 people whose pardon applications are pending in the Justice Department wondering whether there is hope for forgiveness during this president’s term.

What does it take to get a pardon from President Obama?

It’s a question Sala Udin, a former Pittsburgh City Council member and onetime civil rights Freedom Rider, is asking a lot this summer, more than three years after he first asked a president he deeply admires to grant him a pardon for a 44-year-old federal firearms conviction.

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Insurance companies undermine fair hiring efforts

An investigation by the Wall Street Journal reveals the little-known role that insurance companies play in shaping employer policies on hiring people with a criminal record.  Joe Palazzolo reports in “Criminal Records Haunt Hiring Initiative” that the “unseen hand of commercial insurers” frustrates efforts by some employers to implement fair hiring policies, and gives others an excuse for maintaining broad prohibitions on hiring convicted individuals.  “An employee is typically excluded from standard insurance policy against fraud, theft, embezzlement and other crimes—known as a fidelity bond—as soon as the employer discovers that he or she has committed a dishonest act, whether recently or in the past.”

The extent of the problem is illustrated by the story of Louis Henry, an Alabama man who lost a sales-management position at a medical-technology company after one day on the job, when a background check revealed a dated conviction for misreporting the status of a loan on the books of a bank where he worked.   “A May 1 letter from the employer, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, said Mr. Henry’s record placed the company in violation of its insurance policies.”

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Glenn Martin’s “prison-like” White House experience

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The Crime Report published this report about Glenn Martin’s recent experience as an invited guest at the White House, described in Glenn’s open letter to the President, giving further details of the treatment he received and describing the Administration’s response.

Glenn Martin’s “prison-like” White House experience

July 2, 2015 09:01:56 am

By Graham Kates

Two weeks after criminal justice advocate Glenn Martin was nearly denied access to a White House event he was invited to, he’s still waiting for an explanation.

In a widely distributed “open letter” to President Barack Obama last week, Martin revealed that he was required to have a special escort in order to enter the White House complex for a discussion with senior officials on breaking down barriers facing ex-prisoners.

Martin, who is one of the country’s leading advocates for ending those barriers, is an ex-inmate himself. Now head of JustLeadershipUSA, he served time for a robbery conviction 20 years ago—and has since achieved national prominence for his work with former prisoners.

Although he was invited to the meeting, along with a select group of advocates, scholars, elected officials and law enforcement authorities, he was treated as a security risk.

“The staggering symbolism of the ordeal was not lost on me, Mr. President,” Martin wrote in the June 25 letter to Obama and Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy.

“In a country where 65 million people have a criminal record on file, being selectively barred from entering the White House for a discussion about those very same people was as insulting as it was indicative of the broader problem.”

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SBA relaxes rule against business loans to probationers, while other federal agencies keep collateral consequences unchanged

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) last week published a final rule for its federal Microloan Program that will for the first time allow microloans to small businesses owned by someone currently on probation or parole. In its announcement, the SBA noted that this will “aid[] individuals with the highest barriers to traditional employment to reenter the workforce.”  The change was evidently prompted by a review of agency regulations requested by the Cabinet-level Federal Reentry Council established in 2010 by former Attorney General Eric Holder.

While the change is welcome, it leaves in place substantial restrictions for people under sentence in other SBA loan programs, discussed at length in a post on this site last December.

It is also striking for being the only relaxation of federal collateral consequences since the Reentry Council was established five years ago.  As reported on this site, federal agencies are said to be “mostly satisfied” with their the way their regulations address the situation of people with a criminal record.

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DOJ on the fence about appealing federal judge’s expungement order

On June 23, the U.S. Attorney wrote to Judge Gleeson informing him that the government had not yet finally decided whether to appeal his May 21 expungement order in Doe v. United States, and requesting an opportunity to address the scope of the order in the event the appeal is withdrawn.  The government’s letter, reproduced in its entirety below, indicates that the government has been discussing with the FBI how the order might be modified to “effectuate the Court’s intention of precluding the petitioner’s prospective employers from learning of her health care fraud conviction” while also allowing the government “to pursue legitimate law enforcement objectives.”  Those objectives appear to relate to the arrest and prosecution of two of Ms. Doe’s codefendants who remain in fugitive status after more than a decade.  On June 24, in an order granting the government’s request, Judge Gleeson suggested that the government bring any concerns about the scope of the order to the court’s attention even while the appeal is pending.

Here is the text of the government’s June 23 letter: 

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Hip-hop mogul’s arrest highlights liquor license consequences

 

The June 22 arrest of  Sean “Diddy” Combs on three counts of assault with a deadly weapon has spotlighted the severe consequences of conviction for liquor licensees.  An article in The Observer reports that, if convicted, the legendary hip-hop artist may be forced to divest his holdings in Diageo, the world’s largest producer of spirits.   In almost every U.S. jurisdiction, principals in the manufacture or sale of alcohol are required to hold licenses that are generally not available to people who have a felony conviction. While Combs has had a number of high-profile brushes with the law, he’s never been convicted of a felony.

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Federal judge’s extraordinary expungement order will be appealed

Joe Palazzolo over at the Wall Street Journal blog reports that the Justice Department will appeal Judge John Gleeson’s extraordinary May 28 expungement order in U.S. v. Doe, described on this site earlier this month.  We reprint Joe’s piece in full below, since it highlights the disconnect between the Justice Department’s avowed concern with reentry and its evident lack of interest in providing relief from collateral consequences to people with federal convictions.

The Justice Department spearheads the federal government’s efforts to help people convicted of crimes return to society after paying their dues, but a case in Brooklyn is putting its views to the test.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York signaled Friday that it will appeal a rare order by a federal judge expunging the fraud conviction of a health-care aide and mother of four who said her efforts to hold down a job have been sabotaged by her criminal record.

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Ban-the-box featured on PBS NewsHour

On June 17 the PBS NewsHour featured a debate over ban-the-box policies in hiring. Daryl Atkinson, an attorney with the Southern Coalition for Justice in Raleigh, North Carolina, presented the case in favor of eliminating threshold questions about criminal record on employment applications.  Elizabeth Milito of the National Federal of Independent Business argued the other side, claiming that the costs of ban-the-box for a small business “can be pretty steep.” Read more

Should guilty corporations avoid collateral consequences?

In the June 2 issue of the New York Law Journal, Robert J. Anello and Richard F. Albert argue that “criminal law concepts designed to punish human beings—bad boys and girls—are ill-suited to corporate beings.”  They point out that corporations convicted of crime are rarely required to live with the kind of collateral consequences that result in loss of livelihood and social stigma for individuals (“Convicted Corporations Aren’t Really Bad Boys“).   They describe how the government recently made “significant efforts to blunt the effects” of conviction on four major international banks that pleaded guilty to manipulation of foreign exchange rates, so that none of them ended up subject to “rules that would have restricted [their] ability to continue doing business in the United States.”  The banks are currently seeking a waiver of Labor Department rules that would otherwise bar them from dealing with pension and retirement plans, and the government has postponed sentencing pending the outcome of these efforts.   Read more

Should clemency substitute for the rule of law? “A Modest Proposal” says no

We cross-post a recent comment about the Obama clemency initiative from Professor Doug Berman’s Sentencing Law and Policy blog because it proposes to supplement the constitutional pardon power with a relief mechanism built into the legal system (there, a sentence reduction by the court rather than presidential commutation).  It reflects the institutional and practical concerns of Enlightenment philosopher Cesare Beccaria, who proposed in 1764 that

Clemency is a virtue which belongs to the legislator, and not to the executor of the laws; a virtue which ought to shine in the code, and not in private judgment.

Beccaria’s view that clemency should “shine in the code” has a special resonance where collateral consequences are concerned since pardons have become so rare in recent years. Indeed, Judge John Gleeson might have invoked Beccaria when he expunged the conviction of a woman who was unable to find employment because of her criminal record.  We intend to keep arguing in this space for a statutory restoration remedy for the federal system, whatever form it may take.    Read more

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