Law School's Clemency Project Secures Fifth Commutation

On October 27, 2016, President Obama granted 98 prisoner commutations, bringing to 872 the number of federal inmates who have benefited from his expansive use of presidential pardon power. Among them was Antonio Hood, an inmate at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minn., who is serving a life sentence for his low-level role in a crack distribution conspiracy. Mr. Hood was represented by local Minneapolis defense lawyer Paul Engh and Taylor Cunningham (’17), as part of the Law School's Clemency Project, under the supervision of Professor JaneAnne Murray. This brings to five the number of commutations the Law School's Clemency Project has worked to secure.

"The clemency work has given our students an ideal clinical experience: hands-on legal work with real people, production of a sophisticated piece of legal writing, and—because of the relatively short-lived nature of the representation—ownership in a representation," wrote Prof. Murray on the Robina Institute's blog. "But even more meaningfully, we connect students in a personal way to the true import of mass incarceration, rightly described by Walter Dellinger as the 'great unappreciated civil rights issue of our day.'"