Three Clinic Clients Among Those Who Received Biden Commutations
Criminal and Juvenile Justice Clinic Director Erica Zunkel and Her Students Were Instrumental in Securing Sentence Commutations for Robin Peoples, Jasper Vargas, and Dion Walker
On the evening of Saturday, January 18, Clinical Professor Erica Zunkel received a phone call that produced “one of the most powerful moments of [her] professional career.”
The caller was DeAnna Evans, associate general counsel at the White House, who had good news. Federal prisoner Robin Peoples, serving a 110-year sentence that Zunkel has publicly highlighted as a particularly egregious example of unjust incarceration, would be going free.
Peoples is a client of Zunkel’s Criminal and Juvenile Justice Clinic (CJJC), which in 2023 launched an Excessive Sentences Project aimed at freeing prisoners like Peoples from unjust sentences. This project builds on Zunkel’s post-conviction work in the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic. Between that work and the CJJC’s work, since 2020, Zunkel and her clinic students have secured the early release of sixteen individuals, resulting in hundreds of years in prison saved for their clients.
In December, President Biden commuted the sentences of some 1,500 people on home confinement made possible by the COVID-19 pandemic and promised to “continue to review clemency petitions” for people in prison. That promise kept many interested parties, like Zunkel, glued to the news in the waning days of Biden’s presidency.
Finally, with just three days remaining in his term, Biden announced that he was commuting the sentences of some 2,500 nonviolent drug offenders. The list included two CJJC clients serving life sentences, Jasper Vargas and Dion Walker, but did not include Peoples, who was convicted for robbing banks and not for drugs.
Two days later, Biden announced a much shorter list including a handful of pardons and two more commutations, one of whom was Peoples. That is why Evans phoned Zunkel.
“I was so happy for Robin, thinking about the fact that he wouldn’t die in prison and could be free again,” Zunkel said. “And it was also a moment for me personally to reflect on why I went to law school and why I do this work.”
Student Team Efforts
Zunkel said the technical work performed by the clinic students was similar in each of the three cases, focusing on the drafting of sentence-reduction motions and clemency petitions. These tasks involve intensive research of case facts and law, but Zunkel said that effective motions and petitions also require skills of a softer sort. “We need to tell our clients’ stories,” she said. “We need to explain how they’ve changed, why they deserve mercy, and why they deserve a second chance.” Federal sentence reduction law allows judges to grant early release for “extraordinary and compelling reasons.” Clemency gives presidents sweeping power to grant commutations and pardons.
Nat Berry, ’24, now a judicial law clerk at the Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals in Phoenix, worked on both the Peoples and Walker cases as a 3L, his name appearing on sentence-reduction motions for each. Though both cases provided clear arguments for early release, they also differed in important ways, he said.
Walker had served twenty years of a mandatory life sentence imposed under a federal “Three Strikes” law for selling drugs to a confidential informant. Recognizing that life sentences for such offenses are unduly harsh, Congress reformed federal drug laws in the First Step Act of 2018 so that the same offense today would result in a mandatory minimum sentence of fifteen years—but did not make the change retroactive. In other words, if Walker committed the same crime under current laws, he’d likely be a free man now.
Peoples was serving 110 years after prosecutors “stacked” consecutive mandatory-minimum charges for four armed bank robberies. However, when Congress passed the First Step Act to reduce these mandatory minimum sentences and give prisoners an avenue to bring sentence reduction motions to judges, he thought he had a chance for early release. In 2021, after Peoples had served twenty-two years in prison, a judge granted the release, noting the “stunning unreasonableness” of Peoples’s sentence and his excellent prison record.
Peoples did well during his two-month return to regular life, but prosecutors asked the judge to reconsider his decision. While that was pending, the Seventh Circuit ruled in US v. Thacker that nonretroactive law changes, like those in the First Step Act, are not a valid basis for a sentence reduction, and the judge had no choice but to return Peoples to prison.
For Berry, this meant that the Walker and Peoples cases required different approaches. In the Walker case, he said, the central argument was a legal one about the intent of the First Step Act and a US Sentencing Commission amendment in 2023 that provides judges the discretion to consider “unusually long sentences” as a grounds for granting a reduction in sentence. “So, we were really arguing the legal argument that what the Commission has done is legally valid and the courts have to enforce it.”
With Peoples, he said, the tone was more “emotional,” including the particularly strong argument that he had already been released once and had done well. “So, we really made the point that ‘We understand that judges have to make some close calls but, luckily for you, this isn’t one of them,’” Berry said. “If past is prologue, if you release him, he’s going to do great again.’”
While those motions were pending, Zunkel and CJJC students turned to making the case for clemency to Biden using as a foundation the legal work they had completed to file the sentence-reduction motions.
The Importance of Storytelling
Caroline Kassir, ’26, joined the CJJC in September 2024 and worked on a clemency supplement in the Peoples case. She recalled the anxiety as the clock was running out. “There were 1,500 grants for home-confinement cases and then 2,500 for drug cases, and I was trying to figure out what larger category Mr. Peoples might fit into to get relief,” she said. “Even outside of being a law student, I believed that he should not be incarcerated, and I definitely thought [clemency] was our best shot.”
When the news of the final pardons and commutations was announced on January 19, Biden’s next-to-last day in office, Kassir recalled that she didn’t feel surprised. “I’d gotten to the point with this work that I thought: if anyone looked at this, it’s just such a clear case for justice and mercy.” But the commutation was far from a sure thing: since 1980, only two individuals convicted of bank robbery received sentence commutations. Peoples is the third.
Lauren Hinton, ’26, also joined the clinic in 2024 and focused much of her work on the Vargas case. Vargas, a sixty-year-old father and grandfather, served twenty years of a “Three Strikes” mandatory life sentence for transporting drugs. As with the Walker case, Zunkel and her students argued that if the legal changes in the First Step Act were in place when Vargas was convicted twenty years ago, he would likely be free today.
“I think that in these compassionate-release cases it’s important that, as counsel, we really focus on telling our clients’ stories because the legal standards are broad,” she said. “A lot of it was just really talking about his experiences, what he went through, and why he deserves another chance.”
Hinton will begin her legal career next year as a judge advocate general in the US Marine Corps, and she is certain that the clinic experience will be valuable. “I gained a lot of perspective as to what a law degree can do and what kind of positive impact we can have as lawyers,” she said.
Reflections
As Peoples and Walker walked free in February, Zunkel reflected on the experiences that led them to that moment. She credited the students’ “remarkable work” developing the cases to the point of achieving success in the commutations.
“I felt like these were very clear cases for clemency, but I feel that way about other work that we do and sometimes doing excellent, compelling work isn’t enough to get it done,” she said. “So, I will say that I’ve been overjoyed at all three of these commutations and having the opportunity to be involved, and have my students be involved, in something so life-changing where we are seeing, in real time, reunions of family members. Jasper Vargas is a grandfather, and now he’s going to see grandchildren he’s never met, when he thought that he would die in prison. It’s just been an incredible journey and incredible work to be leading and having law students involved in. I couldn’t be happier.”
Peoples, meanwhile, has begun adjusting to life outside prison walls. On February 25, he had his first day of work at the Forest River RV factory in Elkhart, Indiana, the same job he had during his two months of freedom in 2021. An old friend and her husband gave him a place to stay until he gets settled.
“When you’re in prison, all you have left to do is exist,” Peoples said. “You don’t really live. And that’s what I’ve done for 26 years. It’s a blessing to be out here now, but I’m still feeling kind of overwhelmed.”
“I am so grateful to Erica and her students,” he said. “They just have so much compassion, and this wouldn’t have happened without them. They’re heroes.”
Richard Dahl is a freelance writer based in Saint Paul, Minnesota.