Julie Stewart, president and founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), discusses the Justice Department reforms that have revitalized the clemency process for nonviolent federal prisoners; the guidelines for prisoner clemency petitions; and the still-egregious mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest on the show today is Julie Stewart.
She's from Families Against Mandatory Minimums.
That's FAM with two Ms.org.
Families Against Mandatory Minimums at FAM.org.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm great.
Thanks.
What's the deal?
Well, thanks very much for joining us today.
I heard at the bottom of the hour news break there, they said that you've got some good news for us in terms of a possible new clemency policy for nonviolent drug offenders locked.
Is it just in federal prisons or state prisons?
Tell us all about it, please.
Yes, I will.
Yeah, today the Deputy Attorney General announced that basically the Pardon Attorney's Office is open for business, which is a huge statement because the U.S. Pardon Attorney's Office sits in the Justice Department.
It's literally in some corner of the enormous Justice Department, and it basically does nothing.
For the last 20 years, it's pretty much done nothing.
And now the President has requested that that office sort of be cleaned up, and they put a new boss in, a new pardon attorney, who's terrific, and getting kicked out the old one who was awful.
And now the Deputy Attorney General is saying, we want prisoners in federal prison who meet this criteria, and there are about six points that they want them to have met, to send us cases and we will consider your case for clemency.
So the key points are that the person has to have served at least 10 years in federal prison for his offense, and it's not just drug offenses, it's kind of any non-violent crime, which is great.
And they have to be low-level, non-violent, have a good prison record, not have had any violence before they got into prison, so it's very much sort of screening out anybody who might come out and re-offend in some violent way.
So it's huge, it's a huge statement, because this office has been so dysfunctional for so long that basically no one has been granted a commutation.
And a commutation means that someone who's in prison, their sentence is commuted to time served and they are released.
And so that's, like, huge, I mean, people who are doing life sentences now for non-violent drug offenses, for instance, can be considered for release if they meet the criteria and get through the various process that will be put in place to review their petition.
All right, now, so that's a lot of caveats, too, and I always try to be real careful and not get my hopes up for any kind of politician promises, especially when it's something good that they want to do.
I pretty much take their word for it when their plans are malevolent, but...
Okay, so the 10 years thing, or in fact, let's pick on the violence thing for a second there.
What if somebody's in there for a non-violent crime, and then, but in prison, they got in a fight that, you know, from their point of view, or their defense would be it wasn't their fault, they had to, but so now that means tough luck, you still got to do 30 years for your pot transportation crime, or whatever it was?
I think it depends on the circumstances of the case, and that's what...
So they're not just going to throw out anyone who ever, like, got written up in prison kind of thing?
No, that's right.
They won't.
I mean, I think that, you know, if you murdered another prisoner, they will probably not look kindly on your petition, but if you got in a fight, and you've been in for 10 years and your fight was, you know, seven or eight years in federal prison today, who have already served at least 10 years on their sentence, whatever the sentence might be.
And it's not to say, you know, the 10-year mark is, like, one of the six criteria that have to be met, so it doesn't mean that all 23,000 of those people are going to get out, but it does mean that we know there is a fairly sizable chunk of people who have already served 10 years in prison.
Some percentage of them will also probably meet some of the other criteria, whether it's 1%, which, you know, 2,000 wouldn't be bad, whether it's, you know, more than that, I don't know, bad pardon attorney that I have met during my 23 years of doing this.
Wow.
Yeah.
You know, I'm pretty sure, it must have been you, that I first heard of Families Against Mandatory Minimums on a CNN special, it would have been in 1997, I think, about the war on pot and some people who'd gone to prison.
So you guys, I know, have been doing this good work for a long, long time.
We've been doing it before it was popular.
I mean, it's so funny to me now, because when I started FAM in 1991, working on sentencing where you see, you know, what a good job they can do sometimes, you know?
Yeah, no, it's very exciting.
And I, you know, have to say it's way past time, but you know, this is a great step.
On the other hand, this doesn't really solve all the big problems, because it doesn't, it doesn't ensure that no people are going to start going into prison with long mandatory sentences.
Those sentences are still on the books, those sentences still need to be dumped.
Well, I thought they changed that in, what, back a couple years ago, didn't they reform that?
Or that was only kind of cosmetic?
That was only crack cocaine sentences that were, you know, improved, not completely perfectly, but they were improved.
But that was only, you know, one drug.
They still, you know, if you are arrested with a certain amount of marijuana, you're still going to get five years or 10 years in prison, or with LSD, or with methamphetamine.
And the methamphetamine sentences are ridiculously high.
So there's still plenty of, you know, stiff mandatory sentences that should not exist, but do.
And those, and people are walking into federal prison every day.
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