Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Alabama, said he’s somewhat confused and highly concerned about President Obama’s recently released list of prisoner commutations because it includes names of those who’ve been convicted on gun-related crimes – and that label goes against the White House standard of only granting clemency to “non-violent” offenders, he said.
In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Shelby wrote, AL.com reported: “I want to do everything I can to keep our communities safe, and that includes keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, the mentally ill and violent offenders. Right now, I am unsure if the administration shares that goal.”
Shelby, who sits on the Appropriations, is chairman of the subcommittee that watches over the Justice Department. He said the president is wrongfully using his pardon powers in ways that counter his own administration’s policy – which says commutations are for “non-violent” and “low-level” federal offenders.
Of the 200 sentences Obama’s commuted, fully 33 involve those with sentences tied to gun crimes, Shelby said.
“Frankly, I am left wondering why the president and the Justice Department consider individuals who carry guns to drug deals as ‘non-violent,’” he said, AL.com reported. “More importantly, it is unclear to me how these sentence commutations are making our communities safer.”
Shelby singled out two convicts from his own state of Alabama, Ian Gavin and Jerome Harris. Gavin was convicted of possession with intent to distribute cocaine as well as of a firearms offense in 2007. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison and eight years of supervised release. But Obama’s commutation lowered his supervised release to four years.
Harris, meanwhile, was sentenced to 25 years in prison and 10 years of supervised release for a 2006 possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine charge, another cocaine charge and a possession of a firearm in connection to a drug trafficking crime charge. Now, both Harris and Gavin are due to be released from prison on July 28.
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/04/01/obamas-commutations-include-gun-carting-drug-dealers/
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