Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law and national expert on clemency, spoke with NBC News about President Donald Trump’s recent wave of pardons and commutations.
From the article:
... Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota who is an expert on clemency, said every president favors certain types of cases. With Barack Obama, it was narcotics defendants, and with Trump, it’s white-collar cases.
“What merits examination is the process being used right now. Like Biden at the end of his term, Trump appears to be using an informal, closed and opaque process to evaluate petitioners (or those like George Santos who did not even file a petition), while ignoring the thousands of people who followed the rules and submitted a clemency petition through the pardon attorney,” Osler said. “I agree with Trump that the old evaluation system for clemency needed to be demolished; but now it needs to be remade into something accessible, fair, transparent and lasting.” ...
