Criminal,
California Supreme Court
Jan. 17, 2019
Why undermine executive clemency?
The California Supreme Court, it should heed its own advice from March 2018 and recognize that clemency “exists to afford relief from undue harshness or evident mistake in the operation or enforcement of the criminal law.”
Rachel Barkow
Vice Dean and Segal Family Professor of Regulatory Law and Policy
New York University
Rachel is author of "Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration."
Politicians on the left and the right, not to mention the broader public, agree that the United States has a mass incarceration and over-criminalization problem. In many cases, people are serving sentences far in excess of what their crime merits. In this environment, executive clemency is a crucial corrective. It allows governors to reduce sentences that are too long and to give pardons to those who demonstrate their rehabilitation so people no longer bear the burden...
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