Miquelle West, daughter of Michelle West, who is serving two life sentences + 50 years, attends The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls' "100 Women for 100 Women" rally in March 2021 in Washington. The event was hel
Biden’s final executive order commuted sentences for thousands, but “collateral consequences” remain a risk.
Originally published in Capital B News.
Michelle West waited 32 years.
Convicted in 1994 of nonviolent drug offenses, she was ordered to federal prison for two life sentences, plus an additional 50 years.
On Sunday, former President Joe Biden commuted her sentence, meaning she will walk away from a low-security correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, this week as a free woman.
Kemba Smith Pradia waited 24 years.
She had been out of federal prison since 2000, after former President Bill Clinton commuted her 294-month sentence. But it took another 24 years, until Biden’s final full day in office, for her federal drug conviction to be cleared from her permanent record.
In one of his last acts as president, Biden made history by granting a series of commutations that set a record for a single term. These decisions impacted more than 2,500 people — mostly Black and brown — who had filed clemency petitions during Biden’s term and those of his predecessors over the past 30 years.
“America is a country built on the promise of second chances,” Biden said in his final press release, issued the same day that President Donald Trump took office for a second term and coinciding with the federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.
But those second chances, provided through the clemency process, don’t happen overnight. It’s an executive power that only presidents, governors and some state parole boards have the power to issue, but rarely exercise. Those elected officials are also better known to reserve granting clemency petitions en masse at the end of their term or during the holidays — a move multiple legal, civil rights, and social justice advocates said should be exercised more often.
“As happy as we are for Michelle, our work continues,” said Andrea James, executive director of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, a sentencing reform group. “It should not take 10 plus years of advocacy to bring a single woman home.”
Granting more than 10,000 clemency applications, fulfills a key campaign promise Biden made to federal lawmakers, civil rights, and social justice advocates to address the criticism of the 1994 crime bill that included sentencing guidelines of mandatory minimum sentences based on the type and quantity of the illegal controlled substance.
Among the most notable of Biden’s clemency actions was the posthumous pardon of Jamaican-born civil and human rights revolutionary Marcus Garvey on his century-old mail fraud conviction.
Ferrone Claiborne and Terence Jerome Richardson were granted clemency this week. Richardson and Claiborne pleaded guilty in state court to charges connected to the April 1998 killing of a Sussex County, Virginia, police officer during a botched drug bust. Richardson was sentenced to 10 years in state prison, while Claiborne did not receive any jail time. The men accepted a plea agreement to avoid the possibility of the death penalty. Despite entering the plea, both men maintained their innocence.
Following outcries from critics about the leniency of the men’s sentences, federal prosecutors charged them with drug charges, and they were sentenced to life in prison based on the sentencing guidelines for the drugs involved in the officer’s killing.
For those expected to get released from federal prison this week — such as Claiborne, Richardson, and West — the road to true redemption after their sentences were commuted is much longer, and more challenging than most realize, advocates said.
“I’m very grateful that after 24 years I no longer have to worry about my past with applying for a job, getting insurance, going into a school system, [and] traveling outside of the country,” Pradia, 53, told Capital B on Sunday. “So I thank the president and his administration for this honor on this day to receive my pardon.”
When Pradia walked out of prison, she was 29. She had served 6 years of a 24½-year sentence after pleading guilty to selling 255 kilograms of crack cocaine. She maintains her innocence and said she was arrested only because of her connection to her then-boyfriend, who was the subject of a federal drug investigation.
Pradia met West before her release.
“I look forward to being able to give her this necklace that she gave me when I walked out of federal prison,” said Pradia as tears welled up in her eyes during a Zoom press call hosted by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund on Friday. ”She was the first person to actually tell me that I was gonna be released.”
Biden’s action has also been seen as “a tremendous step” to help correct “the historic injustice of ‘girlfriend crimes’ by pardoning” Pradia, and commuting West’s life sentence, said Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, in a statement.
“‘Girlfriend crimes’, which ensnare women in the criminal legal system as a result of their romantic associations, have subjected Black women to some of the criminal legal system’s harshest penalties, often for little more than being in troubled relationships with coercive partners,” Nelson said.
After clemency, many face “collateral consequences”
Claiborne, Pradia, Richardson, and West have been part of what sentencing reform advocates say has been an increase in the mass incarceration of Black and brown parents, relatives, neighbors, and co-workers across the country.
Nearly 2 million people, mostly Black, are incarcerated in prisons or jails. “Compare this to the figures of the early 1970s when this count was 360,000,” according to a report released last year. Today, more than half of the federal prison population consists of people sentenced for drug-related crimes, this month’s Sentencing Project report revealed.
Shortly after her release in December 2000, Pradia launched the Kemba Smith Foundation.
“I made a commitment that I was going to be true to myself and true to those that I left behind in prison,” Pradia said, who along with the LDF, the NAACP, the National Council, and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc., have been advocating for clemency for West as well as other women incarcerated as a result of domestic violence.
“In 2019, the women’s arrest rate was 63% higher for violent crimes and 317% higher for drug crimes than in 1980,” according to a report by the Council on Criminal Justice.
Amanda Bashi, West’s attorney, said her client has been fighting for clemency for three decades. West will be released sometime this week, just like Claiborne and Richardson, their attorneys said.
Bashi alluded to the thousands of clemency applications that are submitted to the president and the nation’s governors each year. The Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney received 1,532 pardon and 12,401 commutation petitions under Biden’s administration.
“Every name on a list is a life, a whole life. It’s a life with a family, with a community, and with a story,” said Bashi on the press call while attempting to fight back tears.
As the stories behind Biden’s commutations and pardons make headlines, this sweeping action has highlighted the legal complexities of the clemency process.
While Biden’s commutations bring rare legal victories, and offer hope to those like Claiborne, Richardson, and West — who have been separated from their families and society for decades — their struggles are far from over.
Although those who receive clemency have their sentences commuted, their convictions remain part of their permanent record. That can make it difficult to rebuild their lives to find employment, housing, and everyday essentials without support from family, friends, and community resources. Sentencing reform advocates call such hurdles collateral consequences following a conviction.
This is why Jarrett Adams, an appellate attorney for Richardson and Claiborne — known locally as the “Waverly Two” — says he will continue to pursue their 27-year-old federal appellate case. He aims to prove that they were wrongfully convicted.
Until those hearings are completed with a judge overturning a conviction, the petitioner who received a commutation still has a felony conviction on the books and are disqualified from being added to the National Registry of Exonerations database, wrote Maurice Possley, senior researcher for the organization, in an email to Capital B.
Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s Republican governor, sharply criticized Biden for commuting the pair’s sentence, calling it “a grave injustice.”
Biden’s final clemency actions included 2,502 commutations and 65 pardons. Mirroring the end of Trump’s first term, Biden upped the ante by dishing out controversial preemptive pardons to family members and others facing potential retaliatory prosecutions during Trump’s second presidency.
Biden’s preemptive pardons on Monday gave Emanuel Williams pause. Williams, a defense attorney with the Legal Rights Center in Minnesota, said the move exposed the double-edged sword that clemency presents “if it is in the wrong hands.”
Williams, 26, successfully argued a clemency application before the state’s Board of Pardons while studying for the bar exam.
“I then started to kind of feel the eeriness of the situation at hand that was presented with these pardons and commutations,” Williams said, adding, “Knowing that commutations or pardons in four years will likely be very different.”
On his first day in office, Trump exercised his clemency powers. He pardoned close to 1,500 of the 1,583 people arrested for the Jan. 6 insurrection, releasing hundreds from federal prison, and bypassing the usual process that relies on a recommendation from the Office of the Pardon Attorney. He also commuted sentences for 14 members of white nationalist hate groups, including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who were largely responsible for the violent acts during the U.S. Capitol riot.
Clemency “can be used as a powerful tool to right some of the ways that the ’94 crime bill has created larger sentencing disparities between Black and brown bodies with their Caucasian counterparts” and “at the same time it can be used to commute sentences for those who have personally attacked Black and brown bodies,” Williams said.
He added: “Always having that kind of information in the back of my mind can create a bittersweet moment whenever presidents have these mass commutations and pardons at the end of their presidency.”
Christina Carrega is the criminal justice reporter at Capital B. Twitter @ChrisCarrega.
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