As Clock Ticks Down, Pressure Mounts on Obama to Free More Drug War Prisoners

‘President Obama has commuted the sentences of more than a thousand federal drug war prisoners, but thousands more have applications in the pipeline, and now, faced with an incoming Trump administration exceedingly unlikely to act on those petitions, scholars, activists, and at least one US congressman are calling on Obama to expedite clemency efforts while he still can.
In a Tuesday letter, more than 50 scholars and advocates, including Van Jones and performer John Legend, as well as representatives from the NAACP and the Southern Center for Human Rights, not only called on Obama to ramp up the pace of commutations, but also to consider granting clemency to entire categories of drug war prisoners without case-by-case review.’
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