Governors, Use Your Clemency Powers

Opinion|Governors, Use Your Clemency Powers

President Trump is making shameless use of his constitutional clemency power, rewarding insurrectionists, cronies, campaign contributors and sundry others. But this is not the only problem. Mr. Trump’s acts of commission are paralleled by American governors’ acts of omission. Even though they control the bulk of the country’s prison population and typically have the power to grant clemency, many governors have consistently failed to exercise the power of forgiveness, to all of our detriment.

Clemency, specifically the power to commute a person’s sentence, is a readily available mechanism to rectify the hyper-punitive sentences regularly meted out in state courts during the past several decades that contributed to the crisis of mass incarceration. The power in many state constitutions to grant clemency is one way to address the vast racial disparities that exist in state prisons — disparities that increase among people serving the longest sentences, which have their roots in the racist trope of the so-called super predator.

Close to 90 percent of the two million people behind bars in the nation are held in state facilities, making the collective inaction by governors around clemency inexcusable. In New York, where there are almost 33,000 people in state prisons, a backlog of almost 1,100 pending clemency applications sits awaiting action. A state government website focused on clemency states that applicants must “demonstrate that they have made exceptional strides in self-development and improvement.”

Surely there are many people among the 1,100 who meet, and even surpass, that threshold — people who have acknowledged responsibility for the harm they caused, have done all they can to atone and have amassed vast evidence of transformation. In the past year, Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, granted a sentence commutation to just one person.

Across the Hudson in New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy, also a Democrat, created a clemency advisory board last year — and later granted several commutations — after failing to grant even a single clemency application in his first seven years in office.

Clemency, the power to grant a pardon and essentially erase a person’s conviction, or to grant a commutation and reduce his or her sentence, has deep roots in the American legal system. The term “clemency” shares its origins with the name Clementia, the Roman goddess of mercy, forgiveness and leniency. The king of Wessex (in what is now southern England) had similar powers to those now held by the American president and state governors as far back as the seventh century, when those powers were referred to as the “prerogative of mercy.”