How State Governors Are Leaving the White House Behind on Criminal Clemency Reform

The United States Constitution grants the president broad and largely unchecked authority to issue pardons for federal offenses. It is one of the most powerful tools available to the executive branch—and it is, by almost any measure, one of the most underutilized and mismanaged. Meanwhile, at the state level, a quieter revolution in clemency administration has been unfolding. Several governors have demonstrated that with political will and procedural innovation, clemency systems can function with integrity, speed, and fairness. The federal government has no comparable record to point to.

This is not a partisan observation. It is an administrative one. The machinery of federal clemency is broken, and the evidence is plain: tens of thousands of petitions pending, average wait times measured in years, no binding timelines, no transparent criteria, and no mechanism for petitioners to understand where their case stands. State systems, at their best, look nothing like this.

What Progressive State Models Look Like

Several states have undertaken meaningful clemency reform in recent years, with results that warrant serious federal attention.

In Pennsylvania, the Board of Pardons operates as an independent body with defined review timelines, public hearings, and published criteria for evaluating applications. Petitioners receive written explanations of decisions. The process is not perfect, but it is comprehensible—a quality conspicuously absent from the federal model.

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has used clemency authority with notable regularity, granting pardons and commutations at a pace that dwarfs recent federal action. More importantly, the California system has developed internal processes for prioritizing cases involving elderly incarcerated individuals, those with demonstrated rehabilitation, and those facing immigration consequences—categories that the federal Office of the Pardon Attorney does not formally recognize as expedited review priorities.

In Illinois, automatic expungement legislation has reduced the burden on executive clemency by addressing low-level conviction records through a legislative mechanism, freeing the clemency system to focus on cases requiring individualized review. This kind of systemic thinking—using multiple policy levers in coordination—is entirely absent from the federal approach.

The Federal System: Designed for a Different Era

The Office of the Pardon Attorney was established in 1891. The regulations governing federal clemency petitions have been revised periodically, but the fundamental architecture of the system has not kept pace with the scale of the federal criminal justice system or the volume of petitions it now receives.

Under current procedures, a petitioner must wait at least five years after conviction or release before applying. The Office of the Pardon Attorney reviews the petition, conducts an investigation, and makes a recommendation to the Deputy Attorney General, who in turn makes a recommendation to the president. The president is under no obligation to act within any defined period. There is no appeals process. There is no required explanation when a petition is denied.

The result is a system that functions less like a legal process and more like a suggestion box—one that the executive branch is free to ignore entirely.

A Federal Reform Agenda That Works

The good news is that reform does not require a constitutional amendment. Much of what is broken can be fixed through executive order, regulatory revision, and legislation. The following recommendations draw directly from what has worked at the state level.

Establish binding review timelines. No petition should remain unreviewed for more than eighteen months. The Office of the Pardon Attorney should be required to render a recommendation within that window, with automatic escalation to the Deputy Attorney General if the timeline is not met.

Create transparent, published criteria. Petitioners and the public should know what factors the Office of the Pardon Attorney weighs when evaluating applications. Factors such as time elapsed since offense, evidence of rehabilitation, employment history, community ties, and the severity of collateral consequences should be codified and publicly available.

Establish expedited review categories. Cases involving elderly or seriously ill petitioners, individuals facing immigration consequences, exonerees, and those convicted under since-reformed sentencing laws should receive prioritized review. This is not preferential treatment—it is rational resource allocation.

Create a petitioner communication portal. Every individual with a pending petition should have access to a secure online portal showing the current status of their application, the stage of review it has reached, and an estimated timeline for action. This costs relatively little and restores a basic measure of dignity to the process.

Appoint an independent clemency review board. The concentration of clemency authority in a single executive, with recommendations filtered through the Department of Justice—an agency whose primary mission is prosecution—creates an inherent structural conflict. An independent advisory board, modeled on state pardon boards, would introduce expert review, insulate the process from pure political calculation, and produce more consistent outcomes.

Lower the waiting period for nonviolent offenses. The current five-year waiting period was designed for a different era of federal criminal justice. For nonviolent, low-level offenses, a two-year waiting period would be more appropriate and would better reflect the realities of modern reintegration.

The Stakes Are National

Clemency reform is not a niche issue. There are currently more than 70 million Americans with some form of conviction record. The federal system touches a significant portion of that population—and the failure to process petitions in a timely, principled manner imposes real costs on real people: lost employment, blocked housing applications, severed family relationships, and deportation proceedings that could have been avoided.

Governors in states across the country have demonstrated that executive clemency can be administered with both rigor and humanity. The White House has the authority—and the obligation—to do the same. The question is not whether federal reform is possible. The question is how much longer the people waiting in that 49,000-petition backlog can afford to wait for it.