Professor Mark Osler: Pardons Expert

We were honored to host Professor Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law and one of the nation’s leading experts on federal clemency and pardons, as our June 2025 White Collar Support Group Tuesday Night Speaker Series presenter. Mark spent the hour on what a federal pardon actually does, how a petition travels through the Justice Department, and who is really deciding clemency right now. You can watch the full recording above.

Most of us have asked the question quietly at some point. Is a pardon a real possibility for me. Mark did not come with encouragement, and that is exactly why the hour is worth your time. He brought a map instead: which form of relief applies to your situation, how many desks a petition crosses before anyone with real power sees it, and why two nearly identical cases from his own clinic landed in opposite piles last winter.

Pardon, commutation, amnesty: three words we use interchangeably and should not

Mark opened by defining terms, because the difference decides which door you are knocking on. A pardon negates many of the effects of a conviction.

And a commutation doesn’t do that. It simply affects the sentence and leaves the conviction in place.

Amnesty, the third word people throw around, usually means a pardon granted before any charge is brought. Jimmy Carter’s grant to Vietnam era offenders is the most significant one in American history.

Then came the part that surprised the room. There is no single clemency system in this country. There are 53, across the states, the military, the District of Columbia and the federal government. In South Carolina an independent board decides, the governor has no role at all, and the state pardons at a high rate. The federal system, the one most of us need, is the outlier. The president holds the power alone, and the consensus is that once it is granted, nobody can take it back. George Washington set the tone the first time anyone used it, after the whiskey tax uprising, and what he told Congress about it is worth hearing in his own words.

Why the Justice Department process almost never ends in a pardon

Here is a belief Mark takes apart in about ninety seconds: that presidents save clemency for their last day in office. That habit started with Bill Clinton. Before him, grants came out steadily across a term, and Ronald Reagan was comparatively generous, with his biggest years in 1982 and 1983. Grant rates held until Reagan, then crashed, and never really came back.

The reason is the route a petition has to travel. Mark counts the desks it crosses, and most of them sit inside the Department of Justice, the same department that asked for your sentence in the first place. He calls it a gauntlet of successive decisions, a series of sieves stacked one on top of the next. Anyone in our group who has run a business will spot the design flaw immediately. His walk through that route is the clearest explanation we have heard of why petitions go quiet for years.

What Trump and Biden changed about who gets clemency

Both have used clemency in ways it had not been used before, and Mark argues the shift has not been recognized for what it is. Grants started arriving by category instead of case by case. Most of them bypassed the established process entirely, and nothing clear has replaced it. And a bar that held firm through the Obama years came down.

Consider one winter. The Hunter Biden pardon, and the statement in which a president said he was acting as a father. Almost 1,500 grants tied to the CARES Act. Thirty-seven commutations off death row. Then 2,490 commutations in one swoop, and 6,000 denials dumped in a single day. Leonard Peltier and Ross Ulbricht, either of whom would have led the news in any other week. Mark’s clinic had cases in both of those last two piles.

we had some of the cases that got granted in the 2490, and we don’t know why. And we had some that got dumped in the 6,000, and we don’t know why.

That is the honest state of play, and it is why the closing stretch matters most to anyone weighing a petition now. Mark names the person the president has said he relies on for pardons, flags what is still unknown about that operation, and points to compassionate release and federal expungement as the next places to watch. He co-founded the federal expungement initiative that launched the day before he spoke with us.

About Professor Mark Osler

Mark Osler teaches at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis. He started as a process server in Detroit, which he calls the very bottom of the profession, and was a federal prosecutor there from 1995 to 2000. In 2011 he founded the first law school clinic devoted entirely to federal clemency petitions, has run it pro bono with his students ever since, and has helped hundreds of people through it. He won Spears v. United States at the Supreme Court, which held that judges could categorically reject the 100-to-1 crack and powder cocaine ratio. His University of Chicago Law Review article with Rachel Barkow drew a lead editorial in The New York Times endorsing their case for clemency reform.