Obama again signals “expect few pardons from me”

Yesterday President Obama participated in a panel discussion of criminal justice issues moderated by Bill Keller of The Marshall Project and streamed to the public.  While the subject of clemency did not come up during the videotaped panel discussion, in a prior interview with Keller the President said that he intended to “speed up the process” of considering prisoner petitions seeking commutation of sentence.  At the same time, he again signaled that he was not similarly interested in cases involving dated convictions where a petitioner is seeking pardon to relieve collateral consequences:

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Updated North Carolina relief guide now available

At long last I have released the 2015 edition of my online guide to relief from a criminal conviction in North Carolina. This free guide, available here from the UNC School of Government, covers the various forms of relief available under North Carolina law, including expunctions, certificates of relief, petitions to restore firearm rights and terminate sex offender registration obligations, and other procedures. It includes changes made by the North Carolina General Assembly through the end of its 2015 legislative session. This edition of the guide is longer, reflecting the greater attention given by the North Carolina General Assembly to this area of law in recent years. North Carolina law now authorizes certificates of relief, patterned after the Uniform Collateral Consequences of Conviction Act. North Carolina also has expanded the opportunities to obtain an expunction. Expunctions are now available for older nonviolent felony convictions. Recent statutory changes prohibit public and private employers and educational institutions from inquiring about expunged charges and convictions and, further, require government agencies to advise applicants that they have the right not to disclose expunged information. People still must meet precise statutory criteria to be eligible for relief, however. Although North Carolina courts granted approximately 13,000 […]

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Another federal expungement case from Brooklyn – is this the beginning of a trend?

On October 8, a former chief judge of the Eastern District of New York held that he was “constrained by controlling precedent” to deny the expungement petition of a woman who feared that her 23-year-old fraud conviction would prevent her from obtaining a nurse’s license.  See Stephenson v. United States, No. 10-MC-712.  Judge Raymond Dearie declined to find the “extreme circumstances” warranting expungement under Second Circuit precedent, noting that the petitioner before him was fully employed and that her aspiration to become a nurse was realistic, in light of the protection afforded her by New York’s nondiscrimination laws.  He proposed that his own willingness to certify her rehabilitation could help satisfy the “good moral character” standard for a nursing license. (Could this be the sort of “certificate of rehabilitation” contemplated by Judge John Gleeson in his second Jane Doe expungement case?  If so, it would seem to require no specific statutory authority for him to issue it to an individual he sentenced, no matter how long ago.) Judge Dearie contrasted the case before him with the one in which Judge Gleeson ordered expungement in May, where the petitioner’s criminal record was having “a dramatic adverse impact on her ability to work,” citing Jane Doe I at *5. […]

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“Old Writ Could Give Ex-Offenders a New Start”

Joe Palazzolo has posted at the Wall Street Journal Blog an article describing an amicus brief filed yesterday in United States v. Jane Doe (Jane Doe II), one of two federal expungement cases before Judge John Gleeson that we’ve been following.  Argument in Jane Doe II is now scheduled for October 26.  (The government has appealed Judge Gleeson’s May 21 expungement order in Jane Doe I to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.)  The brief begins like this: This Court invited the views of Amica on the Court’s authority to issue “a certificate of rehabilitation in lieu of expungement” and the appropriateness of issuing such a certificate in this case. While there is no federal statute that authorizes a court to issue relief styled as a “certificate of rehabilitation,” Amica wishes to bring to the Court’s attention two mechanisms, each perhaps underappreciated but with deep historical roots, by which the Court may recognize an individual’s rehabilitation and otherwise address issues such as those raised by petitioner’s case. The first is by exercising its statutory authority to issue a writ of audita querela, which is available in extraordinary circumstances under the All Writs Act, 28 U.S.C. §1651, to grant a measure of […]

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After prison, a lifetime of discrimination

The problem of mass incarceration was highlighted by the Pope’s visit last week to a Philadelphia jail, and by an HBO Special that aired earlier this week on the President’s visit last summer to a federal prison.  But the public has not yet had an occasion to focus on the broader and deeper problem of mass conviction that has consigned an entire generation of African American men to second class citizenship, and their communities to continued poverty and alienation.  The mere fact of a criminal record has placed a Mark of Cain on millions of Americans who never spent a day behind bars. In this morning’s New York Times columnist David Brooks points out that the growth in state prison systems is driven by the sheer number of people prosecuted rather than sentence length, and he faults prosecutors for charging twice as many arrestees as in the past. But if it is true, as Brooks argues, that most people sent to prison nowadays spend about the same amount of time there as they did thirty years ago, the true crisis in our criminal justice system is represented by the lifetime of social marginalization and discrimination that follows them upon their […]

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