Clarence Aaron was denied commutation, but Bush team wasn’t told all the facts

But his petition had a critical weakness.

U.S. Attorney David York, the top prosecutor for the Southern District of Alabama, opposed reducing Aaron’s sentence.

In 2004, then-Pardon Attorney Roger Adams recommended the White House deny Aaron’s request. Adams said in a recent interview that he wrote the recommendation with some ambivalence.

“Anyone who looks at Clarence Aaron will see a really, really tough case of a young guy in prison for the rest of his life,” Adams said.

His report went to the White House, where it sat for three years among a growing stack of recommendations.

A cursory review

In 2008, Rodgers, a former military judge and federal prosecutor, took over the pardon office and changed the way it handled commutation applications.

Under Rodgers’s predecessors, staff lawyers reviewed each case, gathered pre-sentence and Bureau of Prisons progress reports and wrote recommendations based on their research.

“Some reports were shorter, just a paragraph or two,” said Margaret Love, who served as a pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997. “But there was always enough of a report that you could get an idea of what the basic facts and issues were.”

For the first 2¹ / ₂ years under Rodgers, however, most petitions were handled by paralegals, not staff attorneys, and recommended for denial in batches, said Samuel Morison, a lawyer who spent more than a decade in the pardons office before leaving in 2010 to work for the Defense Department. He said Rodgers instituted the change when there was a significant backlog.

“The office types up a list of names, along with basic sentencing and offense information for each prisoner, and sends the list to the White House with a note that says the attached cases are meritless and should be denied,” Morison said.

At the end of 2010, Rodgers reverted to the old system. He now assigns a lawyer, along with paralegals, to review commutation requests, the Justice Department said.

Still, in the past four years, applications from more than 7,000 prisoners have been denied — 22 times as many as were rejected during Reagan’s eight-year presidency.

The Justice Department insists the accelerated process did not mean applicants got short shrift.

Rodgers “personally reviewed every application for commutation of sentence before recommending their disposition,” a Justice Department official said.

A nine-year odyssey

The White House sent Aaron’s application back to the pardon office for reconsideration in early 2008 as part of a larger push to find clemency candidates.

According to former White House counsel Fred Fielding, his staff had become frustrated by the lack of positive recommendations from the pardon office. In Bush’s final year in office, lawyers began searching through denial recommendations for promising cases and found Aaron.

This time, key elements shifted in Aaron’s favor. Unlike her predecessor, Deborah J. Rhodes, the new U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, supported the petition.

“I have reviewed various documents submitted by Clarence Aaron in support of his petition for commutation of sentence and agree that Aaron should receive a commutation of his life sentence,” her November 2008 memo to Rodgers began.