William Katz:  Urgent Agenda

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OBAMA JUSTICE – AT 12:48 P.M. ET:   This  was bound to happen eventually.  I guess the Obama vetting process wasn't exactly first class.  From the San Antonio Express-News: 

A San Antonio man who was freed from life in prison by President Barack Obama is back behind bars after allegedly crashing his vehicle into another motorist and undercover police cars while fleeing from a drug deal Thursday.

Robert M. Gill, 68, whose life sentence for cocaine and heroin distribution conspiracy was commuted by Obama and expired in 2015, was profiled last year in the Express-News about his readjustment to life on the outside.

Jailed from the time of his arrest in 1990, Gill earned a legal education inside prison libraries and successfully petitioned the then-president for a second chance after his court appeals were exhausted.
He was taken to federal court Friday, and U.S. Magistrate Judge Henry Bemporad ordered him held without bond pending a bail hearing on Feb. 16. Gill is charged with possession with intent to distribute 500 grams or more of cocaine.

He again faces a potential sentence with a mandatory minimum, five years, and could get up to 40.
Gill was one of about 1,700 federal inmates whose sentences Obama commuted as part of a broader campaign to give relief to nonviolent offenders serving long prison terms that dated to a frenzied period in the nation’s war on drugs.

COMMENT:  We shouldn't assume that all commutation cases, or even most, end this way, but we should assume that vetting, like the vetting of immigrants, must be done carefully and thoroughly.

February 4, 2017