If a prisoner is poor—and most are—he or she must navigate this complex process alone or attempt to prepare a compelling clemency petition capable of reaching the President's desk, no easy task.

Even the most skilled attorneys find post-conviction litigation, including clemency work, challenging.

Our mission is to help deserving federal prisoners connect with free, high-quality legal assistance during the post-conviction phase, with a particular emphasis on compassionate release and executive clemency.

We believe mercy should not depend on wealth, and that access to justice should not end at the direct appeal.

The criminal justice system gets things wrong.

Clemency exists to correct those failures.

For centuries, presidents have possessed the power to grant mercy. A pardon erases the legal consequences of a conviction. A commutation cuts short a prison term that has become unjust, unnecessary, or both. Clemency is not a loophole. It is a constitutional check on a system that is capable of cruelty, excess, and error.

Legislation moves slowly. Reforms take years. And even when laws change, the people already trapped inside prison walls are often forgotten.

In fact, swathes of federal prisoners are serving egregiously long sentences under laws that don’t even exist anymore, policies that have been abandoned, and practices that the justice system itself has left behind.

Others are enduring extreme sentences due to systemic inequities.

Clemency doesn't require Congress. It doesn't require another election. It doesn't require waiting.

A president can act immediately.

Every day, elderly prisoners, first-time offenders, and people serving sentences that no longer reflect today's standards remain behind bars while politicians debate and bureaucracies stall.

Clemency exists for them.

The framers viewed the pardon power as a constitutional safety valve—a means of tempering justice with mercy when rigid application of the law produced results contrary to the public welfare. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes later wrote, clemency "is not a private act of grace … it is a part of the Constitutional scheme.”