'I Don’t See Much Mercy in Donald Trump or Jeff Sessions'

Barack Obama commuted the sentences of more than 1,700 federal prisoners, far more than other recent presidents, but there were over 10,000 clemency petitions pending when he left office in January. Those requests, relics of an ambitious but imperfect program, will still be pending when the present occupant of the White House leaves—unless they’ve been fed to the shredder in the interim.

At least that’s the opinion of Mark Osler, one of the driving forces behind the Obama administration’s Clemency Initiative, which launched in 2014. A law professor and former federal prosecutor, Osler runs a commutation clinic at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis that was responsible for getting 11 petitioners out of federal prison during the Obama years.

When it comes to the present administration’s clemency policy, advocates like Osler know not to be aspirational. While he disagreed with the former president over some