President Obama granted clemency to another 102 federal inmates on Thursday.
This recent batch of reduced sentences brings the total number during Obama’s presidency up to 774 prisoners since he came to office, 590 of which occurred over the past year, the most of any year in U.S. history, CNN reported. The majority of these clemencies have been for non-violent drug offenders.
The Obama administration argues that the reduction of these sentences is meant to bring them more in line with current sentencing guidelines.
Obama’s large number of sentence reductions has prompted more inmates to apply before the president’s term is over, creating a backlog, CNN noted.
At the same time, the number of inmates who have applied for pardons or commutations has increased sharply in the final year of Obama’s tenure, creating a backlog of requests for Obama’s team to process before he leaves office in January.
"I’ve told my office that anything that gets to us will get processed," Neil Eggleston, the White House counsel, said in an interview Thursday. "We’re not going to have a failure of resources here. I’m pretty confident that we’ll get to all of those."
Eggleston said Obama would continue to personally review clemency requests up until the final days of his administration.