Presidential pardons, not just for low-level offenders anymore

The mandatory minimum sentencing system effectively has allowed federal prosecutors to choose defendants’ sentences by deciding how to charge them.

The feds sometimes can choose whether to charge buyers and sellers for dealing crack cocaine when it’s still powder — crack commands a longer sentence.

Or not.

[...] when a jury convicts a drug offender, the charges have already determined the sentence.

On Tuesday, the Obama administration granted presidential commutations to 111 federal inmates — including Oakland’s Darryl Lamar Reed, a.k.a. “Lil D.” So Reed stands out as the rare Californian to win a commutation, as well as an exception to the criteria for Obama’s 2014 Clemency Initiative.

Then-Deputy U.S. Attorney General James M. Cole explained that inmates applying for a sentence reduction should be “nonviolent, low-level offenders without significant ties to large-scale criminal organizations, gangs or cartels.”

Reed had taken over the extensive drug operation of his uncle, Felix Mitchell, the onetime kingpin who died in federal prison.

[...] it seems the administration is focusing on the first criterion alone — that an inmate would have “received a substantially lower sentence if convicted of the same offense(s) today.”

In his first term, he released only one low-level offender serving a draconian federal sentence.

In 2013, he stepped up to the plate when he commuted the sentences of eight crack offenders — six who were serving life terms, including Clarence Aaron, a first-time low-level nonviolent offender sentenced to life in prison.

Article II, Sect. 2, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”

A commutation of sentence reduces a sentence, either totally or partially, that is then being served, but it does not change the fact of conviction, imply innocence, or remove civil disabilities that apply to the convicted person as a result of the criminal conviction.

“A pardon is an expression of the President’s forgiveness and ordinarily is granted in recognition of the applicant’s acceptance of responsibility for the crime and established good conduct” after sentence is served.