Former Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich Jr., announced at a symposium hosted by the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law that there is a new clinic being formed that will devote time to the study of pardons, according to The Blog of Legal Times.
“This initiative would have constitutive elements of public advocacy, executive training for governors, and provide a clinical experience for law students,” Ehrlich said. “This initiative promises to be exciting.”
There are some two million people in jail today and it costs $60 billion per year to incarcerate criminals.
“It’s really about doing justice and really practicing law; it [was] the most rewarding part of the job,” Ehrlich added.
Patricia Broderick, the Superior Court Judge for the District of Columbia, said that one-third of children she sees in court come from being neglected.
“Education is such a key,” she said. “We need to find a way to make education a value and to treat [teen] pregnancy.”
Margaret Colgate Love, a former United States Pardon Attorney, said, “In the first hundred years of this country, executive clemency played a very, very operational role in the criminal justice system. Clemency actually is not supposed to play an operational role. Clemency is supposed to signal places where the legal system needs to be fixed; it is not supposed to substitute for a perfect legal system.”