In response to what it calls “a critical and unmet need for education and training of both lawyers representing capital prisoners and decision makers who review petitions for clemency,” the American Bar Association (ABA) has created a new web resource devoted to the clemency process. The Capital Clemency Resource Initiative (CCRI) Clearinghouse—a joint project of the ABA Death Penalty Representation Project and Death Penalty Due Process Project—provides tools and resources for clemency decision makers, capital defense attorneys, and others interested in the clemency process. Misty Thomas, chief counsel for the Death Penalty Due Process Project, said that in every state death-penalty system the project studied, “there were insignificant resources for and attention paid to clemency, leaving it … too hollow to be comfortable for our profession.” The ABA does not take a position for or against capital punishment, but the systemic defects it found led the organization to call for a moratorium on its use. “[I]f we’re going to have the death penalty,” Thomas said, “every single stage should be robust and meaningful,” including clemency. As part of improving the clemency process, the Death Penalty Representation Project prepared a manual for clemency lawyers, Representing Death-Sentenced Prisoners in Clemency: A Guide for Practitioners, that complements the other resources on the CCRI website. But Laura Schaefer, staff attorney for the representation project and the author of the manual, said the project has a broader educational purpose as well. “One part of what we are trying to do is increase public understanding of the clemency process in capital cases … and how it’s supposed to catch wrongful sentences,” she said. Since 1976, clemency in the form of pardons or humanitarian commutations of sentence has been granted to 287 death-row prisoners in the United States. Illinois’s mass commutation of 167 death-row prisoners in January 2003 accounts for more than half of that total. Two death-row prisoners—Thomas Whitaker in Texas and William Montgomery in Ohio—have been granted clemency so far in 2018.

(Lorelei Laird, ABA launches clemency information clearinghouse for death penalty cases, ABA Journal, April 2, 2018; American Bar Association, Capital Clemency Resource Initiative Clearinghouse.) See Clemency.

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