WASHINGTON—Getting word that he would be released from prison after serving 10 years of a 24-year sentence for a minor drug crime was like having “the warmest, fuzziest feelings you ever thought you had – times a hundred times a thousand,” Peter Ninemire told members of Congress on Tuesday.
Ninemire was granted a commutation – or lesser sentence – from President Bill Clinton in 2001. He and three other recipients of executive commutations urged members of Congress to support sentencing reform during a Capitol Hill briefing.
The men and women were there to “put a human face on the fact that we send thousands of nonviolent drug offenders just like them to prison every year at enormous expense to taxpayers,” said Molly Gill, lobbyist for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a nonprofit founded to advocate against mandatory minimum sentencing laws.
“I still can’t believe today that I’m living the dream that I was afraid to dream,” Ninemire said of his second chance. If not for the commutation, he’d still be in prison. Instead he has earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees and runs his own mental health counseling practice in Wichita, Kansas.
In January, Deputy Attorney General James Cole asked attorneys across the country for help identifying inmates who would be qualified candidates commutation. Typically, these people were given lengthy sentences for nonviolent drug offenses under guidelines that are no longer followed today.
Reynolds Wintersmith was granted a commutation by President Barack Obama in December 2013. When he was age 19, he was sentenced to life in prison plus 40 years for selling crack as part of a conspiracy. It was his first offense. At the time, offenders caught with crack received exponentially longer sentences than those with cocaine, the main ingredient in crack. Until the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, an offender caught with 1 gram of crack would be sentenced to prison time based on the same guidelines as someone who had 100 grams of cocaine. Today that ratio is 1-18.
The sentencing disparity “has torn apart lives and families, locked up our youth by the thousands and disproportionately shattered minority communities,” said Michigan Rep. John Conyers, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. FAMM estimates that there are nearly 9,000 federal prisoners still behind bars despite being sentenced under the now defunct laws.
Ninemire was one of 61 commutations granted by Clinton out of 5,488 requests. President George W. Bush received 8,576 commutation requests and granted 11. So far, Obama trails them both. He’s granted 10 commutations and received 11,218 requests.
Stephanie George, who was sentenced to life in prison for a small role in her boyfriend’s drug dealing but released after 20 years by Obama, acknowledged having those same fuzzy feelings as Ninemire, but cried as she listed all that she’d missed while in prison, including the death of one of her children.
“To hear that I was leaving to go home, it was a time of my life where I could breathe again,” she said. But “to lose my son six months before I could get there it was astronomical, I couldn’t believe it.”
Serena Nunn served 11 years of a 16-year sentence for her involvement with a drug conspiracy before her time was commuted by Clinton. She said that since her commutation, she’s most proud of giving birth to her daughter. “That’s number one. The second accomplishment that I’m most proud of is passing the bar and becoming an attorney.”
The federal prison’s budget for fiscal 2014 was $6.9 billion, or about a quarter of the total money allotted to the Department of Justice. The U.S. has nearly one-fifth of the world’s total population, but it incarcerates more than one- quarter of the world’s prisoners.
“We have the world’s largest prison population, the highest rate of incarceration in the world, and a federal prison system that is operating at 137 percent of its capacity,” Gill said. “And half of that federal prison population are, unsurprisingly, drug offenders.”
The commutation initiative is just one of three moving parts in sentencing reform. The U.S. Sentencing Commission has proposed lessening the time given to offenders based on the quantity of drugs they are charged with having. If Congress fails to act to reject these proposals, they will be implemented after November 1, 2014.
A final piece of sentencing reform is the Smarter Sentencing Act, a bill co-sponsored by Democratic Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin and Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah. It recently passed the Senate Judiciary Committee but is caught in congressional gridlock. The SSA would impose less costly minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, changing mandatory minimums of 20-year, 10-year and five-year sentences to 10, five and two years.
According to FAMM, the bill would allow those “8,800 federal prisoners (87 percent of which are black) who are imprisoned for crack cocaine crimes to return to court to seek fairer punishments in line with the Fair Sentencing Act.”
This month, however, former officials of the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Agency released a letter written to Senate leadership asking them to kill the SSA.
“We believe the American people will be ill-served by the significant reduction of sentences for federal drug trafficking crimes that involve the sale and distribution of dangerous drugs like heroin, methamphetamines and PCP,” officials wrote. “We have made great gains in reducing crime. Our current sentencing framework has kept us safe and should be preserved.” Nearly 30 people signed the letter, including several former U.S. attorney generals.
Yet Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee said Tuesday that he would continue calling on both the president and Congress to act.
“Dr. King talked about the fierce urgency of now, and nothing is more urgent, nothing is more now than freedom. And to release people and to do justice is what Dr. King what have said,” he said.
“I think there should be mass commutations,” he added. “And I think they’re going to start to do it.”