Though you are soon to turn to conducting research and preparing your presentation/papers, I am here going to be recommending additional reading for background information to advance our on-going class discussions. Specifically, there are two sets of readings that were on the syllabus that I want to provide here (and I may print out and distribute some of these pieces, but for now I am going to spare the trees and just enable/encourage your review on-line).
For some more history and ideas about the federal clemency power: (1) Charles Shanor & Marc Miller, Pardon Us: Systematic Presidential Pardons, 13 Fed. Sent’g Rept. 13 (2000); (2) Margaret Colgate Love, The Twilight of the Pardon Power, 100 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 1169 (2010)
For lots of details on Prez Obama's use of the federal clemency power: (1) U.S. Sentencing Commission, An Analysis of the 2014 Clemency Initiative (2017); (2) NYU Law School Center on the Administration of Criminal Law, The Mercy Lottery: A Review of the Obama Administration’s Clemency Initiative (2017)
Sentencing Class @ OSU Moritz College of Law 