President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son and President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to set free people who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, bring back memories of what’s considered the most controversial pardon ever: Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. Ford’s pardon of the former president in 1974 sparked outrage among politicians and the American people. 

“I had a visceral feeling that the public animosity to Mr. Nixon was so great that there would be a lack of understanding, and the truth is that’s the way it turned out,” Ford said in an interview broadcast for the first time on Reveal. “The public and many leaders, including dear friends, didn’t understand it at the time.”

This week on Reveal, we look at the politics of pardons and discover that beyond those that make headlines, there is a backlog of thousands of people who’ve waited years—even decades—for presidents to make a decision about their petitions for clemency. 

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2019.

Credits

Reporters and producers: Michael I Schiller and Anna Hamilton | Editor: Taki Telonidis | Data analysis: Melissa Lewis | Production assistance: Najib Aminy, Amy Mostafa, Brett Simpson, and Katherine Rae Mondo | Legal review: Victoria Baranetsky | Production managers: Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Sound design and music: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson

Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, and by Reveal listeners.

Transcript

Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.

Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Multiple times during his final weeks in office, Joe Biden has used what’s been described as a kingly power, the presidential pardon. It started in early December when he pardoned his son Hunter, who was convicted of gun charges and also pled guilty to evading taxes.  
Speaker 2:The pardon, sweeping, covering offenses that Hunter Biden, quote, “Has committed or may have committed or taken part in over the past 11 years.”  
Al Letson:Later that month, Biden commuted the sentences of 1,500 people and pardoned another 39. The White House called it the largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history, and after that, he commuted the sentences of almost all inmates on federal death row.  
Speaker 3:Instead of execution, these 37 inmates will now serve life sentences without the possibility of parole.  
Al Letson:Today, we’re bringing back a show that looks at this presidential power and how it’s been used. Article 2 Section 2 Clause 1 of the Constitution says, “And he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.” In today’s English, granting clemency can mean one of two things. There’s a pardon, which shields someone from prosecution or wipes their criminal record clean. They get their civil rights back, the right to vote, they can get business licenses, even own a firearm. Then there’s the commutation of sentence, where the president reduces your sentence or lets you out of prison, but you still have a criminal record. For his part, Donald Trump has said he’ll use the pardon power on his first day back in office to free people who are serving time for storming the Capitol on January 6th.  
Speaker 4:Will that be a blanket pardon? Does that include everyone?  
Donald Trump:Well, you’ll find out, but it’s going to go quickly.  
Al Letson:And of course, this isn’t his first rodeo. During his first term, President Trump used the clemency power 238 times, and many of those cases were controversial.  
Speaker 6:The president has decided to pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona. The court held him in criminal contempt for violating a judge’s order in a racial profiling case and for continuing to target immigrants in terms of traffic stops.  
Al Letson:And in 2018…  
Speaker 7:From the president this morning…  
Al Letson:… Trump even tweeted…  
Speaker 7:… that he has the absolute right to pardon himself. He goes on to write-  
Al Letson:Playing politics with pardons, whether it’s Trump threatening to pardon himself or Biden pardoning his son, may feel like new territory. But it all sounds familiar to historian Ken Hughes, an expert on presidential abuses of power at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.  
Ken Hughes:Nixon was using the pardon power during Watergate and during the Watergate cover-up as a tool of expanding his own political power.  
Speaker 9:The burglars broke through a fire escape door that led to the committee’s offices.  
Speaker 10:Democratic officials today held a series of meetings to talk about tighter security-  
Al Letson:For Ken Hughes, what’s happening today stirs up memories of Richard Nixon and Watergate.  
Ken Hughes:I always try to get past the Watergate break-in as quickly as possible because it’s just the tip of the iceberg.  
Al Letson:The tip of the iceberg that ultimately revealed how Nixon was involved in political conspiracy, sabotage, and obstruction of justice. A lot of the evidence came from the famous Nixon tapes.  
Ken Hughes:Richard Nixon was cursed and blessed with kind of omnipresent taping in the Oval Office and various other White House locations.  
Al Letson:Nixon’s secret recordings were a goldmine for the House Judiciary Committee, which used some of them to build an obstruction of justice case against the president. But Ken was convinced he could find even more examples of abuses of power. So when the National Archives released the tape in bulk, he did some digging.  
Richard Nixon:[inaudible 00:04:09].  
Al Letson:This is conversation 437-19. It’s hard to hear, but it’s a pardons bombshell. It’s 1973 and Nixon is talking to White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman. The Watergate cover-up is collapsing and the president is trying to shield himself. In one part Nixon says, “There’s nothing more important than to keep me in this effing office.”  
Richard Nixon:There’s nothing more important [inaudible 00:04:41] than to keep me in this (beep).  
Al Letson:The ace up Nixon’s sleeve is the pardon power. Nixon tells Haldeman that if he can bury the trail connecting him to Watergate, it’s pardons all around. He says, “I don’t give a…  
Richard Nixon:I don’t give a (beep) what comes out on you.  
Al Letson:… “what comes out on you. There’s going to be a total pardon.”  
Richard Nixon:There is going to be a total pardon.  
Ken Hughes:Now, this promise, which I found back in the 1990s when I was going through the tapes on my own, had never come to light during the Watergate hearings, and it would’ve been all by itself an impeachable offense.  
Al Letson:What is Nixon telling his staff and the people that may have committed illegal acts about pardons? What is he talking to them about?  
Ken Hughes:The president was telling his top aides, who were also his co-conspirators in obstruction of justice, that they could commit perjury before the Senate Watergate Committee and count on a pardon from the President. He was basically abusing his pardon power, perverting his pardon power, as a get out of jail free card, a way to put himself above the law.  
Al Letson:During Trump’s first term, it was no secret that pardons were openly talked about for people who worked for him. The final report from the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election describes how pardons were discussed for Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, and former campaign chair Paul Manafort. When they came under questioning, here’s Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, being interviewed by CNN in 2018.  
Speaker 11:You said, “I think this may get cleaned up, this probe, with a few pardons.”  
Rudy Giuliani:These things get cleaned up. Ford did it, Reagan did it, Carter did it, Clinton did it, and Bush did it in political investigation.  
Speaker 11:So you’re saying after the probe is over, it may be cleaned up with any pardons?  
Rudy Giuliani:If people were unfairly prosecuted.  
Al Letson:In Richard Nixon’s case, he never got to grant those pardons. A year after that conversation with his chief of staff, his presidency was crumbling.  
Dan Coble:There had been a vote by the grand jury to characterize Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator in obstruction of justice.  
Al Letson:Dan Coble is a professor of law at Capital University in Ohio. Dan says, in the final days of Nixon’s presidency, White House aides are starting to think about the president’s exit strategy. This is when Nixon goes from being the person who grants pardons to someone who could benefit from one. The first mention of a pardon for Nixon comes on August 1st, when Secretary of State Al Haig calls a meeting with the vice president, Gerald Ford.  
Dan Coble:Now, you have to remember, this is Ford as vice president who has no role in pardons at all. And so he’s got Haig giving him a handwritten document that says that a president can pardon prior to indictment in the federal system.  
Al Letson:Haig spells out a few options and he tells Ford that the president could pardon himself or be pardoned by his successor. Ford is surprised by this, and for good reason. It’s the first time a US president has ever tested the waters of pardoning himself. But it never comes to that. Instead, on August 8th, 1974.  
Richard Nixon:Good evening, this is the 37th time I have spoken to you from this office.  
Al Letson:Facing possible impeachment, Richard Nixon resigns.  
Richard Nixon:Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as president at that hour in this office.  
Al Letson:Ford becomes president and he’s eager to put Nixon behind him.  
Gerald Ford:My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.  
Al Letson:He wants to get to work on problems his administration has inherited, unemployment, high inflation, and a domestic energy crisis. But the country is still obsessed with Watergate and the public wants to know what will happen to Nixon. Almost a month into his presidency, Ford does what he never imagined doing.  
Gerald Ford:Serious allegations and accusations hang like a sword over our former president’s head.  
Al Letson:He pardons Nixon.  
Gerald Ford:To the pardon power conferred upon me by the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he-  
Al Letson:Years later, as a law professor writing about clemency, Dan saw this move as the most constitutionally significant pardon in US history, and he thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to ask Ford why, in the end, he decided to do it?”  
Gerald Ford:Hello?  
Dan Coble:Good afternoon, President Ford. This is Dan Coble, professor at Capital Law School.  
Gerald Ford:Yes, nice talking to you, Dan.  
Dan Coble:Nice talking to you. Thank you for-  
Al Letson:Ford says, when he first came into office, he wasn’t leaning towards pardoning Nixon. Then came his first presidential press conference on August 28th, 1974.  
Gerald Ford:Please sit down. Good afternoon. At the outset, I have a very-  
Dan Coble:He felt that the country had a number of significant economic problems, foreign policy problems.  
Speaker 15:Would you use your pardon authority if necessary?  
Dan Coble:And yet the only questions that the press seemed to be interested in his view pertain to what will happen to Richard Nixon.  
Speaker 16:May I just follow up on Hellick’s question? Are you saying, sir, that the option of a pardon for former President Nixon is still an option that you will consider depending on what the courts will do?  
Gerald Ford:Of course, I make the final decision and…  
 Well, as I returned from that press conference where I was convinced that the only way to solve the problem was to think about granting a pardon.  
Dan Coble:And that’s your first press conference where you had several pardon questions, I believe?  
Gerald Ford:I had many pardon questions.  
Dan Coble:Yeah.  
Gerald Ford:And so I went back to the Oval Office, and as I recall, I asked Phil Buchen…  
Al Letson:Phil Buchen was the chief White House lawyer.  
Gerald Ford:… to explore my authority in the first place and to report back to me because I was very frank. I was considering the possibility, providing it would achieve what I thought was necessary, of getting Mr. Nixon’s problems off my desk.  
Dan Coble:So that press conference really triggered your realistic consideration of it right off the bat, huh?  
Gerald Ford:Absolutely. I was dismayed that the press was so preoccupied with it that I could visualize that every press conference that followed for the next X number of months would be the same. And I thought that was unfortunate from the country’s point of view.  
Al Letson:Ford was in a bind. The public wanted a resolution. Nixon was threatening to plead not guilty if he was prosecuted, promising to drag a messy trial through the courts.  
Speaker 17:President Gerald R. Ford summoned newsmen to the White House suddenly this Sunday morning and announced that he was granting a full, free, and absolute pardon to former President Richard M. Nixon.  
Dan Coble:Now, you’ve been quoted as calling the pardon decision, “The most difficult of my life ever.”  
Gerald Ford:I had a visceral feeling that the public animosity to Mr. Nixon was so great that there would be a lack of understanding. And the truth is, that’s the way it turned out. The public and many leaders, including dear friends, didn’t understand it at the time.  
Dan Coble:His very dear friend who had been his press secretary for years resigned when he granted the pardon to Nixon. He asked him not to resign, but the day that he did that, he said, “I cannot work for you any longer,” and he resigned, and that was a huge personal loss to Ford. So he got tremendous pushback, I think, for having granted the pardon.  
Al Letson:Do you think he expected that? I mean, it’s such a controversial decision, even looking back now. I mean, did Ford understand the consequences of that decision?  
Dan Coble:He knew that there were so many people who hated Richard Nixon who would never forgive him for pardoning him. He suggested that he wanted to grant the pardon quickly because it was like ripping a bandage off a wound. Better to do it quickly and get the pain out at once rather than do it slowly or drag it out.  
Al Letson:And the outcry wasn’t because of the pardon alone.  
Gerald Ford:I was criticized that I didn’t get an admission by President Nixon that he was in error and so forth.  
Al Letson:But Ford didn’t look at it that way.  
Dan Coble:One of the very interesting personal facts about Ford is that he, for the rest of his life, kept in his wallet a page from an opinion of the Supreme Court in a case called Burdick v. United States.  
Gerald Ford:I have the card in my pocket, which I carry with me. Let me try to find it here.  
Dan Coble:Is that the Burdick case?  
Gerald Ford:The justices found that a pardon, quote, “Carries an imputation of guilt, comma, acceptance, comma, a confession of it,” end quote. So whether Nixon agreed to the pardon, the fact that he accepted it is a confession.  
Dan Coble:I ultimately came away from my interview with him convinced that he had acted out of principle. He did what he believed was best for the country as opposed to best for himself. And in fact, the fact that critics who had said that he had done the wrong thing with Nixon, in retrospect, had changed their mind and said that Ford had done the right thing for the country.  
 Were you ever worried that maybe Nixon had done anything else that you didn’t know about that you’d be pardoning him for?  
Gerald Ford:That was plenty.  
Dan Coble:That’s wonderful. So that was enough then, in other words.  
Gerald Ford:That was enough. The disruption of justice, that was ample.  
Al Letson:Dan’s interview with President Ford is from 2001. Ford passed away five years later at the age of 93.  
 Beyond the high-profile pardons that make headlines are thousands of people who officially filed for clemency and are waiting in a very long line.  
Charles Tanner:What is it that we’re sitting in here for, just rotting away, wasting tax money, when we can be out working and doing the things that we supposed to be doing.  
Al Letson:When we come back, how the pardon system broke down. You are listening to Reveal.  
Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson.  
 Today we’re talking about clemency, the power the president has to set people free from federal prison or scrub their record clean after they’ve gotten out. Some pardons, like Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon, or Joe Biden pardoning his son, get lots of attention. But there’s another story, one that doesn’t make the headlines as much. It’s the story of people who are trying to get clemency from the president, folks who have gone through the official process and are waiting for answers. Back in 2019 we first brought you a story about one of those people. It’s a story that begins in the ring. It’s a summer night in 2003, and the Civic Center in Hammond, Indiana is full of people. They’re here to watch the fights.  
Speaker 18:It’s a battle of Indiana. George “Honey Boy” Blades takes on the undefeated Charles “Duke” Tanner.  
Al Letson:The battle’s being broadcast on national TV, and that’s a big deal for the up and coming boxers. Charles “Duke” Tanner and George “Honey Boy” Blades, both from Indiana, are meeting in the ring for the first time.  
Speaker 18:Duke Tanner in the red trunks. He is unbeaten at 17 and 0. Everywhere his entourage goes, you can hear him chanting, “Who’s got next?” His nickname slash slogan is, “I got next.”  
Al Letson:The two men enter the ring and touch gloves.  
 Honey Boy is smaller. He dances around at a frenetic pace. Duke looks rooted, solid in his stance. He snaps out his left jab over and over. The punches come incredibly fast.  
Speaker 18:Tanner snapping back Blades head with that jab.  
Al Letson:Then Duke explodes into motion, delivering body shots in combinations.  
Speaker 18:Oh, he caught him with a right hand, timed ii perfectly with Duke Tanner.  
Al Letson:Duke catches him with a solid right, then chases Blades, raining down big punches. It looks like he’s going for the knockout.  
Speaker 18:Ah, Blades looks to be in trouble. Let’s see if he can steady himself here.  
Al Letson:But Blades doesn’t go down, and by the ninth round they both look gassed. They’re holding onto each other, winded, dripping with sweat. The fight goes a full 10 rounds and in the end-  
Speaker 18:… of your winner, Charles Duke “I got next” Tanner.  
Al Letson:The decision goes to Duke.  
 It’s been more than 20 years since that fight, and Charles Duke Tanner has spent most of that time in federal prison.  
Speaker 19:This call is from-  
Charles Tanner:Charles Tanner.  
Speaker 19:An inmate at a federal prison. This call is being recorded and is subject to monitoring. Hang up to decline the call or to accept dial five now.  
Al Letson:Hey, Duke, how you doing?  
Charles Tanner:I’m having another blessed day, man. Another day closer to coming home.  
Al Letson:A lot was going on around the time of that fight. Duke was 23 years old, a hometown hero from Gary, Indiana. He came up through the police athletic league’s boxing program and the Golden Gloves. He went on to a 19-and-0 professional career.  
Charles Tanner:It was the best moment of my life, but I was also in so much with trying to get my family and my friends and I got caught up, that’s in a moment when I got caught up into the crime life trying to save everybody.  
Al Letson:Duke was involved in drug trafficking and he got caught in a sting by the Gang Response Investigative Team, a state and federal task force. They accused Duke of running a criminal organization called The Renegades that sold crack, powder cocaine and marijuana.  
Charles Tanner:I was found guilty by a jury and they gave me a life sentence for it. I had life without parole. My only way home was, I hate to say it but my only way home before would’ve been in a casket.  
Al Letson:Duke got two life sentences without the possibility of parole. Duke’s arrest back in 2004 and his two life sentences were part of America’s war on drugs.  
Ronald Reagan:Drugs are menacing our society.  
Al Letson:Which was launched by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.  
Ronald Reagan:They’re threatening our values and undercutting our institutions. They’re killing our children.  
Al Letson:Congress passed a bunch of tough on crime bills like the Anti-Drug Abuse Act.  
Ronald Reagan:Last year alone, over 10,000 drug criminals were convicted and nearly $250 million of their assets were seized by the DEA.  
Al Letson:New sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums put first time offenders away for decades and there was nothing judges could do about it even if they thought the sentence was too harsh. Then came the Crime Bill of 1994.  
Speaker 20:When this bill is law, three strikes and you’re out will be the law of the land. The penalty for killing a law enforcement officer will be death.  
Al Letson:Three strikes laws added a lot of nonviolent drug offenders to the growing federal prison population. So let me sum it up. When Ronald Reagan took office, there were about 26,000 people in federal prison. Today there are more than 150,000. And African Americans are 20 times more likely to be sentenced to life without parole for a nonviolent crime than white convicts. Mark Osler thinks drug sentencing laws from that era were unfair.  
Mark Osler:I was a federal prosecutor in Detroit from 1995 to 2000, which meant that I did a lot of crack cases. And after a while I stopped believing in the sentences that we were getting. There was the 100 to 1 ratio back then between crack and powder cocaine that created incredibly long sentences for crack.  
Al Letson:Mark stopped being a prosecutor and started fighting sentencing laws. He took it all the way to the Supreme Court.  
Mark Osler:Specifically working to change that ratio of 100 to 1 in crack sentencing. And we won. In 2009, I won a case in the Supreme Court, United States versus Spears. The Supreme Court held that sentencing judges could categorically reject that ratio.  
Al Letson:The next year, Congress changed the law so that sentences for crack cocaine were more in line with powder cocaine, but it didn’t apply to people who had already been convicted.  
Mark Osler:That’s how I got interested in clemency, is looking for a way to make that new law apply to people who were rotting away in prison over a sentencing rule that was now gone.  
Al Letson:And it wasn’t just the sentencing. It was the way the drug war led to mass incarceration and how it disproportionately affected African American men. In Duke Tanner’s case, he got life even though it was his first offense and it was nonviolent.  
 Is a guy like Charles Duke Tanner who the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they put together the pardon power in the first place? I mean, who do you think it was made for?  
Mark Osler:I think it was made for exceptional circumstances, either broadly or individually. It was kind of a social safety valve in a way, that if something felt unfair, that it was a way of addressing that unfairness whether it was one person or many.  
Al Letson:The case against Duke and The Renegades was built with the cooperation of an informant who’d been caught with drugs and a gun. That man wore a wire and set up a phony drug deal. He showed up with a duffel bag and cooler filled with fake cocaine. As soon as Duke took the containers and put them in the back of his girlfriend’s Grand Am his life changed forever.  
 All that to say, for Charles Duke Tanner, who was sentenced to life in federal prison, there’s only one person in the world with the power to get him out. At the time we spoke, Donald Trump was still in his first term.  
 What would you say to the president if you could talk to him directly?  
Charles Tanner:If I could talk to President Trump, just tell him I’m seeking this clemency based off of change, hope, and the possibilities of making America great again. Like me, I feel still young. Even though I’m 38 years old I plan on fighting again. But me just to be able to lace the gloves up again, I won a championship of life. You know what I mean? To share that back with other kids that’s coming up and not make the mistakes that I did and do the things that I’ve done that landed me in federal prison.  
Al Letson:So tell me, how many times have you applied for presidential clemency?  
Charles Tanner:I applied October of 2014 and I did a new one just this October of 2018 that’s pending right now.  
Al Letson:There’s a system that’s been in place for 130 years to process clemency requests like Duke’s. It’s called the Pardon Attorney’s Office and it’s a part of the Department of Justice. They make recommendations to the White House. It’s where Duke’s application went first. Sam Morrison is a lawyer who worked in that office for 13 years.  
Sam Morrison:It’s a matter of trying to look at the whole person.  
Al Letson:Sam used to review applications. Now he represents clients trying to get clemency.  
Sam Morrison:The criteria in general would be things like one, what is the nature of the offense? How serious was it? Was there a victim? How long ago did it occur? What, if any, other criminal record does the applicant have? All those things go into the mix.  
Al Letson:Duke seems to fit the criteria. He’s a nonviolent first-time offender. He completed over 1000 hours of educational programs in prison. He mentored other prisoners. Duke gathered 81,000 signatures on a petition and a letter of support from the mayor of his hometown, Gary, Indiana. All these factors should work in his favor with the lawyers at the Justice Department.  
Sam Morrison:Because if you can convince them that you are not a risk to recidivate and that you have the right attitude, that you accept responsibility for what you did, and so on, and they give you a favorable recommendation, well, that’s all the president typically is going to know about the case, and so you’re very likely to get a pardon.  
Al Letson:That’s how it’s supposed to work. But if you go to the Department of Justice website and count the clemency petitions that are waiting for answers, there are more than 10,000 of them waiting for a yes or no. For comparison, when President Reagan took office, the number was around 500. The big jump came during the Obama era. And in a few minutes we’re going to explain how that happened.  
 For now, what you need to know is that it is a much bigger number than it used to be. What does that mean for the people behind bars who are waiting?  
Charles Tanner:I have rehabilitated. I have done everything that my sentencing judge told me to do when he gave me a death sentence. I’ve done it and even more. What is it that we sitting in here for just rotting away wasting tax money? Where we can be out working and doing the things that we supposed to be doing, like I’m asking for the president to give me a clemency and commute my sentence and let me go home. And be a productive citizen. That’s the best way that I see fit for me.  
Al Letson:In 2016, Duke’s sentence was reduced to 30 years after changes were made to federal sentencing guidelines, but he still had nearly 12 years left to serve. For Duke and thousands of others locked up in federal prison, the chance of presidential clemency provides a ray of hope.  
Charles Tanner:I have the sleepless nights, but I stay in prayer. Actually, right now I’m fasting right now anyway. So we just praying. We just praying and waiting. I got-  
Al Letson:And just like that, his phone call is cut off.  
 Praying and waiting. There’s not much else he can do at this point, but there are other people who are trying to do something.  
Amy Povah:I’ve got so many who have double life sentences, life sentences for a first offense, and that should be the biggest red flag of all for a society. And clemency is really the only thing that can correct a huge problem on a big scale.  
Al Letson:You’re listening to Reveal.  
Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. When we first aired this show back in 2019, Charles Duke Tanner, a former pro-boxer, was serving a 30-year sentence in federal prison for a nonviolent, first-time drug offense. He filed a petition with the Pardon Attorney’s office and was waiting, like thousands of others for news from the President. And there were a lot of people rooting for Duke Tanner, including Amy Povah.  
Amy Povah:We’ve sent in the clemency petition, as you know, and then the supplemental [inaudible 00:00:41].  
Al Letson:She’s on the phone with Duke right now. He calls her often from prison. Amy helped Duke file his most recent application for clemency.  
Amy Povah:And so, you’re anticipating a return, a big return of Duke Tanner, light heavyweight boxer, back in the ring?  
Charles Tanner:Yes. Yes, for sure.  
Amy Povah:Well, I better have a front row seat.  
Charles Tanner:Oh, yeah. Come on. Actually, you’re going to be the one walking out with me when I come out, when we come out.  
Amy Povah:Oh, wow, I can’t wait.  
Al Letson:We’re inside Amy’s dining room on an overcast day in Malibu, California. It’s her makeshift office, covered with stacks of paper, boxes full of letters from prisoners and their supporters. Amy runs a volunteer nonprofit called the Can Do Clemency Foundation. She started it to help women serving life sentences for nonviolent drug crimes. Now she’s helping men get clemency, too. Nonviolent drug offenders like Duke. Over the years, she’s helped a lot of people. She’s worked with them to fill out petitions, collect letters of support, she’s even held vigils in front of the White House.  
Amy Povah:Josephine Ledezma, she is an absolute sweetheart. She volunteers in the chapel. She’s serving life without parole.  
Al Letson:In this video from YouTube, Amy’s standing in front of the White House, holding a big, blow-up photo of a woman named Josephine Ledezma. Amy calls her Josie In the picture, Josie is wearing a maroon cap and gown from one of the many programs she completed in prison.  
Amy Povah:She’s already served over 20 years. She’s been in since 1992. It’s time to reunite, her children, her small [inaudible 00:02:24].  
Al Letson:Now her kids have kids. Josie’s got 10 grandchildren. Just like Duke, Josie was sentenced to life in prison for drug trafficking. It was her first offense, a nonviolent crime. Josie and Duke are two of the dozens of people Amy is working with to get clemency.  
Amy Povah:I’ve got so many who have double life sentences, life sentences for a first offense, and that should be the biggest red flag of all for a society. And clemency is really the only thing that can correct a huge problem on a big scale. People come out of prison every single day who have committed murder, arson, or bank robbery, or all kinds of different crimes who get less time than a lot of people serving life for pot. And they’ve got more time than somebody who has priors, and has raped, and even killed somebody.  
Al Letson:Most of the people she’s helping are in prison because of the war on drugs. When it started in the 1980s, about 30,000 people were in federal prisons. By President Obama’s first year in office, that number had ballooned to more than 200,000. Obama saw this as a problem. So in 2014, he started something called the Clemency Project.  
Barack Obama:It does not make sense for a nonviolent drug offender to be getting 20 years, 30 years, in some cases, life in prison.  
Al Letson:The Clemency Project was designed to get nonviolent, first-time drug offenders out of prison, after they paid their debt to society.  
Barack Obama:By exercising these presidential powers, I have the chance to show people what a second chance can look like.  
Al Letson:Under the program, Obama did let a lot of people out of prison. He gave out 1,715 commutations of sentence, compared to George W. Bush, who only gave out 11. But even with the Clemency Project, a lot of people who met the criteria were not released.  
Amy Povah:Very early on, I started seeing perfect candidates getting denied, women who were first offenders, who were minor participants, and right then I was just like, “Oh, this is not going well.”  
Sam Morrison:It was kind of hit or miss.  
Al Letson:That’s Sam Morrison, who we heard from earlier. He worked in the pardoned attorney’s office from 1997 to 2010.  
Sam Morrison:He granted, it was 1,700-and-something commutations. That’s a big number, but not in comparison to the size of the federal prison population. It’s not a big number. He could easily have granted 20,000, not 1,700. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the number of people who, on the face of it, qualified.  
Al Letson:One of the cases that was rejected was the boxer, Charles “Duke” Tanner.  
Charles Tanner:I had been down 10 years and I had clear conduct. It was non-violent crime, my first arrest in my life. So my case manager was like, “Hey, this is for you. Let’s push for this.”  
 So we put it in and September of ’16, and I got denied. They didn’t give me a reason why. They just said, “Denied, and you have one year to follow up.”  
 Now, my only co-defendant who went to trial with me, got granted clemency. So, it was a big pill to swallow for me on that one.  
Al Letson:Why do you think you were denied if your co-defendant actually got it?  
Charles Tanner:I don’t know. Actually, my co-defendant, well, he wasn’t a first-time offender, but he got it, and he’s home now, I’m thankful. I watched a lot of people get it. And they didn’t fit all of the prongs, but they got granted clemency somehow.  
Al Letson:The chaos of Clemency Project 2014, who got help and who didn’t, it was frustrating for a lot of people, including the pardon attorney at the time, Deborah Leff. She resigned in 2016. She wrote a letter saying her office was underfunded, and understaffed, and that the White House lawyers weren’t taking her recommendations.  
Sam Morrison:She simply wasn’t given the resources to do what she ostensibly was supposed to be doing. So she got frustrated and said, “I’m not going to do this anymore.”  
Al Letson:After Deborah Leff resigned, there was no pardon until Elizabeth Oyer was appointed in April 2022. That meant for six years, there were just a series of acting pardon attorneys whose recommendations were mostly ignored by the White House.  
 If the White House is ignoring the recommendations of the Pardon Attorney’s office, what’s the point of having one? Are we just burning taxpayer money? They wouldn’t give us an interview. It’s a black box.  
Sam Morrison:Yeah, that’s intentional. They want it to be a black box. But. you’re right. It’s kind of a pointless exercise.  
Al Letson:So where are all the petitions that are waiting on decisions from the president? Are they sitting in a drawer somewhere in the White House?  
Sam Morrison:It doesn’t mean that they’re all yet at the White House. So those cases are all going to be at one stage or another of the investigation process. Eventually, a recommendation will be written in each one and it will make its way to the White House. But it doesn’t mean they’re all there yet. And I can’t tell you, and the Justice Department won’t tell you, where all those cases are at any particular time. So we don’t know how many of those are at the White House right now.  
Al Letson:Amy Povah knows what it’s like to ask for clemency and to wait while a petition works its way through the system. That’s because as a young woman, she was sentenced to 24 years in federal prison for conspiracy to traffic narcotics.  
Amy Povah:With conspiracy., Even if you don’t sell it, even if you don’t import it, if you’re associated with somebody who does, the Conspiracy Law, that’s the trigger word.  
Al Letson:In Amy’s case, her ex-husband ran an ecstasy operation, manufacturing millions of pills of the party drug. Now, he was caught in the early ’90s and cooperated with law enforcement, and he only got four years in prison. Amy, on the other hand, was not directly involved with the drug business, but after her husband was arrested, she collected some of the drug money. She did not cooperate with the FBI and got sentenced to 24 years.  
 Amy was sent to FCI Dublin, a federal prison in northern California. She remembers a phone call with her mother not long after she got there.  
Amy Povah:I was crying. I just remember almost screaming. I was like, “I’m in prison!”  
Al Letson:After nine years behind bars, Amy gets called into her case manager’s office. As she makes her way through the prison, she fears the worst.  
Amy Povah:So I just kept thinking, “Oh, my God, what could have gone wrong? Maybe Mom and Dad, maybe something’s wrong with them.”  
Al Letson:Her case manager was frazzled.  
Amy Povah:She said, “I need you to sit down. I’ve got to set you up on probation. I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to do that. I got to make an airplane reservation for you.”  
 And I said, “Why?”  
 And she just looked at me and she said, “You’re going home.”  
 And those three words.  
 And I was just like, “What?”  
 And she said, “Finally,” she said, “you received clemency. And I have to have you out of here by 5:00.”  
 So she kept telling me to sit down. And I would sit down. And then I would pop out of my chair like a jack-in-the-box  
Al Letson:Amy’s sentence was commuted by President Bill Clinton in 2000. She had put in an application a few years earlier, and after nearly a decade, Amy was suddenly free.  
Amy Povah:So it says, “To all to whom these presents shall come greeting [inaudible 00:10:38]”  
Al Letson:She’s reading from the actual signed clemency document. It’s what you’d expect from such a grand declaration of freedom, faded, cream-colored paper signature and black ink, a gold seal. Presidential Clemency Petitions are something Amy’s gotten very familiar with over the years, both in prison and after she was freed as an advocate for other people trying to get one.  
 Amy thinks Duke Tanner has a strong case for clemency. They talk a lot, sometimes twice a day.  
Charles Tanner:And for Trump to give it to me, it’ll really, it’ll shock it, it’ll the world like this.  
Amy Povah:Well, not to mention the fact [inaudible 00:11:16].  
Al Letson:It’s Thursday afternoon and there is a lot going on at Amy’s.  
Amy Povah:You’re not going to believe this. Oh, but now, I shouldn’t have taken your call because Josie’s arriving.  
Al Letson:Their phone call is interrupted. Amy’s got a visitor. She heads to the back door and walks down a few steps.  
Amy Povah:Come on. Oh, my goodness. Look at you.  
Josie Ledezma:Look at you. Oh, my God! We made it.  
Amy Povah:We made it, you’re so right. Oh, my goodness.  
Al Letson:It’s Josie Ledezma, the woman Amy was trying to get out of prison at the White House vigil. The last time they saw each other, they were serving time together in a federal prison around two decades ago.  
Josie Ledezma:Gosh.  
Amy Povah:Here, go ahead, sweetie.  
Josie Ledezma:This is beautiful. Oh my goodness.  
Amy Povah:Wasn’t it fun to be able to drive now?  
Josie Ledezma:Yes, especially out here. I’m like, “Oh, my God, I didn’t know this existed. It’s gorgeous.”  
Amy Povah:You’re welcome. Anytime.  
Josie Ledezma:Thank you.  
Al Letson:Josie was released by President Obama after 24 years behind bars.  
Amy Povah:Oh, God.  
Josie Ledezma:Oh, my God. It’s so nice to see you.  
Amy Povah:What a journey.  
Josie Ledezma:Yes, definitely. Definitely.  
Al Letson:The two women walk inside and sit at Amy’s kitchen table, posters with faces of prisoners lean against the wall. Amy and Josie are two of the lucky ones. Most people who apply don’t get clemency.  
Josie Ledezma:It’s awesome to be home, to be out, to be able to drive, and feel the air hit my face, and be able to just see freedom. But one of my pains is that I still have people in there that I love, sisters, people that I grew up with that are still in there. I think they deserve a chance to come home, also.  
Al Letson:A chance to come home. That’s what Amy and Josie want for the nonviolent prisoners of the war on drugs. People like Duke. His son Charles III, was just two years old when Duke got locked up.  
Charles Duke II…:Hello, President Trump. I would like to ask you to please release my Dad from prison.  
Al Letson:This is a video Duke’s son made and posted to YouTube in 2019.  
Charles Duke II…:I know that he made a huge mistake and he really looks back on his mistake and regrets it, and I feel like he would never do it again. My Dad’s been in my life ever since I was young. We have a great relationship. He’s been helping me every step of the way. He helps me and my friends. He taught me right from wrong. I would just please want you to release my Father from prison. Thank you.  
Al Letson:What has it been like being apart from him and not being able to be there as he grows up?  
Charles Tanner:That’s the worst thing that I lost, being there to, physically be there for him, to teach him how to tie his shoe, to teach him how to drive, and to see him in his sports, and just teaching him how to be a man.  
 But I didn’t let prison stop it. We have a beautiful relationship. But to be there with him, and to get him ready to send off to college, and become a real, real man.  
Al Letson:Yeah.  
Charles Tanner:And I need to be there in his presence to show him, even though I showed him so much from inside these walls.  
Al Letson:So that’s where we left it, back in the summer of 2019, which seems like forever ago. A little over a year goes by. We don’t hear much from Duke. And then, something unexpected.  
Speaker 21:An ex-boxer from Gary, Indiana, serving life in prison, is now, instead, of free man.  
Speaker 22:The president granted him clemency.  
Al Letson:On the 21st of October 2020, President Trump commuted Duke’s sentence. Duke walked out of prison in Pennsylvania that same day.  
 The next morning, Reveal producer Michael Schiller caught up with Duke on the phone. He was at the airport in Philadelphia waiting for a flight home.  
Charles Tanner:What’s up, Mike.  
Michael Schiller:Duke!  
Charles Tanner:What’s going on, Mike?  
Michael Schiller:Duke!  
Charles Tanner:Man, listen, man. It finally came, brother.  
Michael Schiller:Oh, man. I’m so happy for you. That’s wonderful. Wonderful. How you feeling?  
Charles Tanner:Right now, man, I feel great, man. I’m sitting next to my son.  
Michael Schiller:Oh, wow.  
Charles Tanner:So, it is just a great feeling, man. That’s what really made me know it was real, once I saw him, I got to embrace him, and hug him as long as I wanted to. I got to drop some tears, man. I’ve been trying to cry for 16 years and they wouldn’t come out.  
Al Letson:So why Duke Tanner, out of thousands of others who were also waiting? The Pardon Attorney’s office didn’t respond. When we asked Duke credits Amy Povah and other supporters for getting the attention of the White House. We know he was one of five nonviolent offenders serving long sentences who were released that day. It was less than two weeks before the 2020 election. A video of Duke reuniting with his son ended up in a campaign ad for Trump.  
Speaker 23:This moment was 16 years in the making. Charles Duke Tanner embracing his 18-year-old son.  
Al Letson:A few weeks later, I checked in with Duke just to see how he’s adjusting to life.  
 Man, it is good to see you in the flesh, via Zoom.  
Charles Tanner:I’m happy to be here.  
Al Letson:How does it feel to come home? What did that feel like?  
Charles Tanner:I was just actually having a conversation about my freedom, and it was just like some people feel like it’s not real. But I feel it’s real. I know I’m here. I’m free.  
Al Letson:Can you walk me through it? What happened?  
Charles Tanner:So I’m just sitting in my cell waiting for the count to clear, and my case manager, him and a couple of other officers came, and he said, “Hey, we need to talk to you in the back.”  
 So I walked to the back. And the guys say, “We got to get you out of here.”  
 I say, “Get me out of here? Where I’m going?”  
 And he said, “The president signed off on your clemency a couple hours ago, and you get an immediate release. And you can’t even go back to your cell because you’re no supposed to be here.”  
 And once again, I just start praying and I was sweating. And next thing you know, I was in the hotel, free.  
Al Letson:So how is it being back with your son?  
Charles Tanner:Oh, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s like, he’s been driving me around, but he’s in college, so it’s about an hour-and-a-half away. But he comes home on the weekend and we get to spend time together.  
 And we still learning each other. We are having fun. I asked him, “I’m getting on your nerves?  
 Said, “No, Dad, you’re not getting on my nerves.”  
 And I call him early in the morning. I’m still on prison time. I wake up at 5:30. Now I get a phone. I call him, wake him up. He say, “Dad, I don’t go to class until like three hours later.”  
 But I just get to see him.  
Al Letson:Yeah.  
Charles Tanner:So it’s a beautiful thing.  
Al Letson:Our lead producer for this week’s show is Michael I Schiller. The Nixon-Ford segment was produced by Anna Hamilton. Taki Telonidis edited the show. Thanks to Melissa Lewis for help with the data and to Najib Aminy and Amy Mostafa. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production managers are Steven Rascon and Zulema Cobb, original score and sound designed by the dynamic duo, J. Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando, my man, yo, Arruda. They had help from Brett Simpson and Catherine Steyer Martinez. Our theme music is by Comorado Lightning. Our interim executive producers are Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. Support for Reveal is provided by The Riva and David Logan Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and The Hellman Foundation.  
 Support for Reveal is also provided by you, our listeners. We are a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX.  
 I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story.  

Michael I Schiller has worked for the Center for Investigative Reporting since 2013 as a multimedia reporter, producer, and creative director. His work spans radio, animation, visual design, and documentary film. The Dead Unknown, a video series he directed about the crisis of America’s unidentified dead, earned a national News and Documentary Emmy Award, national Edward R. Murrow Award, and national Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award. His animated documentary short film The Box, about youth solitary confinement, was honored with a video journalism award from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California chapter, a San Francisco International Film Festival Golden Gate Award, and a New Orleans Film Festival special jury prize, and it was nominated for a national News and Documentary Emmy for new approaches.

Melissa Lewis is a data reporter for Reveal. Her work has appeared in the Oregonian, the Los Angeles Times, and New York Times Magazine. She’s passionate about programming, data visualization, open source, Korean food, and libraries. You can reach her at mlewis@revealnews.org or via her website, melissa.news.

Najib Aminy joined Reveal in 2018 and has worked as a production manager, associate producer, reporter, and producer. His reporting has landed him on Democracy Now, The Brian Lehrer Show, and Slate’s What Next podcast. His work at Reveal has earned him the George Polk Award, two Edward R. Murrow awards, two Gerald Loeb awards, multiple Investigative Reporters and Editors awards, and recognition as a DuPont-Columbia finalist. In a previous life, he was the first news editor at Flipboard, a news aggregation startup, and he helped build the company’s editorial and curation practices and policies. Before that, he reported for newspapers such as Newsday and the Indianapolis Star. Najib also created and hosted the independent podcast Some Noise, featured by Apple, the Guardian, and the Paris Review. He is a lifelong New York Knicks fan and is a product of Stony Brook University’s School of Journalism, and mainly works so he can feed his cat.

Victoria Baranetsky is general counsel at the Center for Investigative Reporting (d/b/a Foundation for National Progress), where she advises the organization on its full range of legal activities, including counseling reporters on newsroom matters (newsgathering, libel, privacy, subpoenas), advising the C-level on business matters, and providing legal support to the board. She has litigated on various issues on behalf of the organization, including arguing before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Prior to CIR, Victoria worked at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the New York Times. She also clerked on the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals. She holds degrees from Columbia University, Columbia Journalism School, Harvard Law School, and Oxford University. She teaches at Berkeley Law School as an adjunct professor and is a fellow at Columbia’s Tow Center. She is barred in California, New York, and New Jersey.

Nikki Frick is a copy editor for Reveal. She previously worked as a copy editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and held internships at the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and WashingtonPost.com. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was an American Copy Editors Society Aubespin scholar. Frick is based in Milwaukee.

Steven Rascón is the production manager for Reveal. He has also produced the KQED podcast On Our Watch: New Folsom, a serial investigation into the death of two whistleblowers inside California’s most dangerous prison. Their reporting has aired on NPR stations such as Capital Public Radio, WHYY, and KCRW. He also helped produce the Peabody-nominated Reveal podcast series Mississippi Goddam. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley.

Zulema Cobb is an operations and audio production associate for the Center for Investigative Reporting. She is originally from Los Angeles County, where she was raised until moving to Oregon. Her interest in the wellbeing of families and children inspired her to pursue family services at the University of Oregon. Her diverse background includes banking, affordable housing, health care, and education, where she helped develop a mentoring program for students. Cobb is passionate about animals and has fostered and rescued numerous dogs and cats. She frequently volunteers at animal shelters and overseas rescue missions. In her spare time, she channels her creative energy into photography, capturing memories for friends and family. Cobb is based in Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, three kids, three dogs, and cat.

Jim Briggs III is a senior sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. He joined the Center for Investigative Reporting in 2014. Jim and his team shape the sound of the weekly public radio show and podcast through original music, mixing, and editing. In a career devoted to elevating high-impact journalism, Jim’s work in radio, podcasting, and television has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, IRE, Gerald Loeb, and Third Coast awards, as well as a News and Documentary Emmy and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Sound. He has lent his ears to a range of podcasts and radio programs including Marketplace, Selected Shorts, Death, Sex & Money, The Longest Shortest Time, NPR’s Ask Me Another, Radiolab, Freakonomics Radio, WNYC’s live music performance show Soundcheck, and The 7 and Field Trip from the Washington Post. His film credits include PBS’s American Experience: Walt Whitman, the 2012 Tea Party documentary Town Hall, and The Supreme Court miniseries. Before that, he worked on albums with artists such as R.E.M., Paul Simon, and Kelly Clarkson at NYC’s legendary Hit Factory Recording Studios. Jim is based in western Massachusetts with his family, cats, and just enough musical instruments to do some damage.

Fernando Arruda is a sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. As a multi-instrumentalist, he contributes to the music, editing, and mixing of the weekly public radio show and podcast. He has held four O-1 visas for individuals with extraordinary abilities. His work has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, Edward R. Murrow, Gerald Loeb, Third Coast, and Association of Music Producers awards, as well as Emmy and Pulitzer nominations. Prior to joining Reveal, Arruda toured internationally as a DJ and taught music technology at Dubspot and ESRA International Film School. He also worked at Antfood, a creative audio studio for media and TV ads, as well as for clients such as Marvel, MasterClass, and Samsung. His credits also include NPR’s 51 Percent; WNYC’s Bad Feminist Happy Hour and its live broadcast of Orson Welles’ The Hitchhiker; Wondery’s Detective Trapp; and MSNBC’s Why Is This Happening?. Arruda releases experimental music under the alias FJAZZ and has performed with jazz, classical, and pop ensembles such as SFJazz Monday Night Band, Art&Sax quartet, Krychek, Dark Inc., and the New York Arabic Orchestra. He holds a master’s degree in film scoring and composition from NYU Steinhardt. Learn more about his work at FernandoArruda.info.

Al Letson is the Peabody Award-winning host of Reveal. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, at age 11 and as a teenager began rapping and producing hip-hop records. By the early 1990s, he had fallen in love with the theater, becoming a local actor and playwright, and soon discovered slam poetry. His day job as a flight attendant allowed him to travel to cities around the country, where he competed in slam poetry contests while sleeping on friends’ couches. In 2000, Letson placed third in the National Poetry Slam and performed on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, which led him to write and perform one-man shows and even introduce the 2006 NCAA Final Four on CBS.

In Letson’s travels around the country, he realized that the America he was seeing on the news was far different from the one he was experiencing up close. In 2007, he competed in the Public Radio Talent Quest, where he pitched a show called State of the Re:Union that reflected the conversations he was having throughout the US. The show ran for five seasons and won a Peabody Award in 2014. In 2015, Letson helped create and launch Reveal, the nation’s first weekly investigative radio show, which has won two duPont Awards and three Peabody Awards and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice. He has also hosted the podcast Errthang; written and developed several TV shows with major networks, including AMC+’s Moonhaven and Apple TV+’s Monarch; and is currently writing a comic for DC Comics. (He loves comics.) When he’s not working, Letson’s often looking for an impossibly difficult meal to prepare or challenging anyone to name a better album than Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides.