President Obama Commutes Sentences For 330 Drug Prisoners On Final Day In Office

President Barack Obama shortened sentences for 330 drug prisoners Thursday in a move that came less than 24 hours before Donald Trump takes office, reports The Huffington Post.

From The Huffington Post:

With Thursday’s announcement, Obama has now granted commutations to 1,715 federal prisoners. A HuffPost review of Thursday’s list indicates that all of those 330 clemency cases were for drug or drug-related cases.

“With this last act of mercy, President Obama has closed out a historic effort to restore some balance and fairness to a federal prison system that has caused needless destruction of thousands of lives and families,” Jessica Jackson Sloan, national director of the #cut50 initiative, said in a statement. “We continue to waste our precious resources to lock up people who have committed drug-related crimes that do not warrant decades, and certainly not life, in prison.”

…Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, who will soon become acting attorney general, said in a statement that the Office of the Pardon Attorney had processed 16,000 petitions since April 2014, what she said was “as enormous as it was unprecedented.”

Obama has granted commutations to more people than the past 12 presidents combined and set a U.S. history record for granting the most clemencies in one day, reports The Washington Post.

SOURCE: The Huffington PostThe Washington Post

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