This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 10th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama has issued hundreds of commutations of federal sentences in recent months, placing him among

the President's who used that power the most.

But what about pardons?

Adam Bates, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, since the President has been historically stingy with pardons.

The Obama administration likes to take credit for President Obama giving more commutations than his past nine predecessors combined.

But what they leave out of that is that he's actually one of the stingiest pardon presidents

in modern history, the DOJ started keeping records of how many pardons were

granted by presidents in about 1901.

Since 1901, President Obama has granted fewer pardons than any president.

So these commutations are great.

It's a step in the right direction.

But when your sentence is commuted, they're just taking years off the end of your sentence.

So you're still a convicted felon.

You still have all of the civil penalties and the collateral harm that comes along with

being a convict versus a pardon, which is either the crime didn't

happen or we don't think that what you did justifies punishment, so your record is wiped clean

if you get a pardon.

So it's true that President Obama has issued a lot of commutations.

He's at a very high pace for commutations, but he's at a historically low pace for

for pardons, which kind of balances out the analysis a little bit.

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