Groups that advocate for prisoners have criticized Mr Obama for being stingy with his power Photo: AFP
Stephen Cook: More evidence of the new energies rising and forgiveness being provided as Obama commutes drug prisoners’ sentences Russia’s Vladimir Putin pardons oil tycoon Mikhai Khodorkovsk during four hour press conference.
Barack Obama Commutes Sentences for 8 Drug Convictions
From AP – December 19, 2013 | Thanks to Golden Age of Gaia.
President Barack Obama commuted the sentences of eight people he said were serving unduly harsh drug sentences in the most expansive use yet of his power to free inmates.
All eight were sentenced under old federal guidelines that treated convictions for crack cocaine offenses harsher than those involving the powder form of the drug. Mr Obama also pardoned 13 others for various crimes.
The president signed the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010 to cut penalties for crack cocaine offenses in order to reduce the disparity. But the act addressed only new cases, not old ones.
Mr Obama said those whose sentences he commuted have served at least 15 years in prison, many under mandatory minimums that required judges to impose long sentences even if they didn’t think the time fit the crime.
“If they had been sentenced under the current law, many of them would have already served their time and paid their debt to society,” Mr Obama said in a written statement. “Instead, because of a disparity in the law that is now recognized as unjust, they remain in prison, separated from their families and their communities, at a cost of millions of taxpayer dollars each year.”
In the previous five years of his presidency, Mr Obama had only commuted one drug sentence and pardoned 39 people. A pardon forgives a crime without erasing the conviction, typically after the sentence has been served. A commutation leaves the conviction but ends the punishment.
Groups that advocate for prisoners have criticized Mr Obama for being stingy with his power – George W. Bush granted 189 petitions for pardon and 11 for clemency, while Bill Clinton granted 396 for pardon and 61 for clemency. White House officials say Mr Obama had only approved a single clemency petition among more than 8,000 received because it’s the only one that had been given a positive recommendation by the Justice Department.
The old sentencing guidelines subjected tens of thousands of blacks to long prison terms for crack cocaine convictions while giving far more lenient sentences to those caught with powder who were more likely to be white. It was enacted in 1986 when crack cocaine use was rampant and considered a particularly violent drug. Under that law, a person convicted of possessing five grams of crack cocaine got the same mandatory prison term as someone with 500 grams – 100 times – of powder cocaine. The Fair Sentencing Act reduced the ratio to about 18-1 and eliminated a five-year mandatory minimum for first-time possession of crack.
Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers his annual press conference to Russia
Putin Provides Pardon for Man Considered to be “Enemy”
By Roland Oliphant, Moscow, The Telegraph, UK – December 19, 2013
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he will pardon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch who has languished in jail on tax evasion and embezzlement charges since challenging Mr Putin’s authority a decade ago, in a bomb-shell decision that appears linked to the up-coming Sochi Winter Olympic Games.
Mr Khodorkovsky, who is widely viewed as Mr Putin’s arch enemy, joins a number of high-profile prisoners including Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina who will be released in an amnesty ahead of the February Games.
“He has served more than 10 years, that is a serious term, I think that a decision must be made [on a pardon],” Mr Putin said in apparently off the cuff comments after journalists surrounded him at the end of a four hour press conference.
Mr Khodorkovsky had never before submitted an appeal for clemency, but had “written such a document very recently,” Mr Putin said.
“It will be enacted shortly,” he added.
The bomb-shell announcement provoked confusion in Mr Khodorkovsky’s own camp, with defence lawyers initially denying either they nor their client had made any such appeal.
Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky Photo: AFP/Getty Images
“He did not appeal [for a pardon] and we know of no one who appealed on his behalf,” said Khodorkovsky’s lawyer Vladim Klyugvant. “We don’t know have any such information, although people have appealed for a pardon over the past several years.” But they later put out a statement retracting all comments until Mr Khodorkovsky had spoken with his lawyers.
A source close to Mr Khodorkovsky’s legal team told the Telegraph that the former oligarch appealed for a pardon because his mother has cancer. The source, who asked not to be named, added that if the petition is successful it should be granted in the next few days.
Mr Khodorkovsky, currently an inmate of prison colony No. 7, a remote camp north of the Arctic Circle in Karelia, was one of the original “oligarchs” to mass fabulous wealth and power in the rough-and-tumble privatizations of state property that followed the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s
Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers his annual press conference to Russia
Starting out as a small entrepreneur running a cafe, he quickly he rose to control his own bank, Menatep, through which he eventually acquired control of Yukos, Russia’s largest oil company.
But when Vladimir Putin arrived in the Kremlin determined to curb the power of the oligarchs, the two men found themselves on a collision course over management of the oil and gas sector and governance of the country — with Mr Khodorkovsky increasingly looking like a potential rival for the presidency.
By late 2003, the relationship between the two men was at breaking point, and on 25 October that year a convoy of special forces surrounded Mr Khodorkovsky’s private jet on the tarmac at Novosibirsk airport and arrested him at gun point.
He was subsequently sentenced to nine years for tax evasion after a controversial trial in 2005. In 2010 Mr Khodorkovsky received a second 12 year sentence on charges of embezzling a vast amount of oil, though after a judge reduced the sentence he was due to finish that term in August next year.
Time does not seem to have cooled relations with the two men, with Mr Khodorkovsky regularly issuing statements from prison attacking Mr Putin for rolling back democracy. Mr Putin, in turn, has angrily batted aside questions about Mr Khodorkovsky in previous press conferences.
The announcement of a pardon came a day after the Russian parliament approved a wide-ranging amnesty of those accused of non-violent crimes that would release some of the country’s highest profile prisoners.
Mr Putin confirmed on at his press conference that the amnesty would include Ms Alyokhina and Ms Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot, despite what he called their “disgraceful” punk performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 2012.
“I feel sorry for them not only because they are in prison, but because they degraded themselves,” he said.
Ms Tolokonnikova’s husband, Pyotr Verzilov, has already flown to the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk in anticipation of his wife’s release from a prison hospital there. He has said he expects her release in the coming days.
And he added that the 30 Greenpeace activists arrested by Russian forces after a protest at a Russian oil rig in January would also be going home — though he added that he hoped their ordeal in jail had “taught them a lesson.” All three cases have drawn sharp criticism from both Western governments and NGOs including Amnesty International, and the move appears to be a consolidated effort to win over international opinion ahead of the Winter Olympics this February – a pet prestige project that Mr Putin has personally nurtured to fruition and which he is anxious to see pass off smoothly.
Several Western leaders, including Barack Obama, have announced that they will not attend the on February 7 opening ceremony of the Olympics, in what seems to be calculated snub amid growing concern about the country’s human rights record.
Openhearted Rebellion 