In the United States federal criminal system, there is no formal pathway to clear your record, no standardized process to revisit an excessive sentence, and no built-in mechanism for recognizing rehabilitation. Once convicted, your options for relief are vanishingly few - unless the President decides you deserve mercy.
This is the narrow corridor of clemency, one of the few remaining levers of hope for people who have served or are facing the prospect of serving federal time in the United States.
Long regarded as a symbolic or ceremonial act, clemency is now undergoing a quiet transformation. What was once rare and opaque is becoming more visible, more contested, and, for a growing number of incarcerated individuals, more urgent.
As petitions skyrocket and public pressure mounts, one figure at the center is Sam Mangel, a federal prison consultant and nationally recognized expert on clemency and pardons. His work offers a window into how the system operates, how people are navigating it - and how the very future of justice may shift as a result: “Clemency is one of the oldest powers granted to the President of the United States and while the legal foundation is clear, the process for securing clemency or a pardon has been anything but. That’s now beginning to shift.”
Clemency allows for the forgiveness of a federal crime (a pardon) or the reduction of a sentence (a commutation). Since the 19th century, clemency applications have passed through the American Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, a little-known body tasked with reviewing petitions and offering recommendations. In practice, this review process has been long criticized for being slow, secretive, and arbitrary. The odds of success were vanishingly small.
As Mangel says, “It’s not even that the system was overly-bureaucratic. It was basically invisible. People would apply for clemency not knowing if anyone was actually reading the application.”
In 2023, it is believed there were more than 10,000 petitions waiting for review.
Those winds are changing, in part, in response to growing public sentiment that federal prosecutors are often overzealous, especially in cases involving first-time offenders charged with non-violent crimes. The cost, both human and economic, of lengthy federal prison terms for white-collar defendants or regulatory violators has come under renewed scrutiny.
The U.S. has long led the world in incarceration, but the federal system in particular has lacked the flexibility to course-correct when the punishment no longer fits the crime. Unlike many state-level systems which offer automatic expungement and opportunities for grace, there’s no mechanism for such things in the federal system.
With courts unable to revisit old sentences and Congress stalled on reform, clemency is becoming a pragmatic solution to a structural failure.
Or as Mangel says, “Use of pardon and commutation powers is not just about mercy, it’s about unburdening a system that has no other release valve. And this is one that’s really starting to stick: I used to receive a few inquiries a month, but now it’s a few inquiries every single day.”
A part of Mangel’s consulting practice is helping families prepare, coordinating the documents they need, and thinking through their approach. And they’re helping people find success in a challenging system.
In doing so, Mangel’s team is not just guiding families through the process - they’re helping shape what second chances look like in modern America.
This article was written in cooperation with Kaitlyn Gomez