We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. It is a plain description of a public process, with every requirement taken from the Office of the Pardon Attorney's own instructions. Check anything here against justice.gov before you act on it.

This page is not about our cases. It is for the person who just learned clemency is possible, has no idea where to start, and has no one to ask.

“Clemency” is the whole family. It is not one thing, and asking for the wrong one wastes months.

• Pardon — you finished your sentence and you want the rights back and the weight off the name.
• Commutation — you are serving now and you want the sentence shortened.
• Remission of a fine or restitution — the money is the part crushing you.
• Reprieve — a postponement of punishment.
• Conditional versions of a pardon or a commutation, granted with strings attached.

Almost everyone needs one of the first three. All of them go to the same office, and all of them are decided by one person.

People use the words interchangeably and they are not interchangeable. Here is what actually separates them.

What they share matters just as much. Neither gets a hearing — the whole process is written. Neither has an appeal if the President says no. Neither costs anything to file. And neither requires a lawyer.

A pardon does not erase your conviction. Nothing does.

The Department's instructions say it plainly: a pardon will not expunge the record, and you must still disclose the conviction wherever a form asks for it — though you may disclose the pardon alongside it. Many of the disabilities that follow a federal felony come from state law, not federal, so they do not automatically lift either. The Department describes a commutation as an extraordinary remedy that is rarely granted.

That is smaller than people imagine and bigger than it sounds. It is the difference between a door that is locked and a door that is merely heavy.

Federal convictions only. If you were convicted in state court, the President cannot help you and no amount of filing in Washington will change that — that pardon belongs to a governor. Military convictions go to the Secretary of the service branch that ran the court-martial.

Then the waiting period: five years after release from confinement, or five years after conviction if you were never sentenced to prison.

Know what that rule is. It is a Justice Department regulation. It is not in the Constitution and it does not bind the President. The Pardon Attorney told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the President keeps the authority to consider a request from someone ineligible under the regulations, or who never filed at all. Presidents have always used it that way.

The regulation governs the Department's paperwork. It has never governed the President. Which means the waiting period is not a reason anyone has to wait.

Set aside an evening and a folder. Most of this you already have; the rest you can request for free.

• Your judgment of conviction — plus the district, the case number, and the judge. The clerk's office has it.
• The indictment or information you were charged under.
• Every arrest of your life. Any state, local, federal or foreign authority. Including a DUI. Including the ones that went nowhere. Leaving one out can be treated as falsifying the petition, and that is a worse problem than anything you are trying to disclose.
• Every delinquent debt, whether or not you dispute it, and every civil lawsuit you have been a party to, bankruptcy included.
• Every unpaid tax obligation — federal, state and local. You are allowed to attach an explanation, including a payment plan you have agreed to. Attach it.
• Proof you paid the fine, the restitution, the special assessment.
• Where you have lived and worked since, with dates. Employers, addresses, gaps. Account for the gaps.

Be exhaustive about the ugly parts. The Office is not testing whether your record is clean. It is testing whether you tell the truth about it.

That is the design of the whole thing. The petition is sworn before a notary and the letters are sworn too, because candor is the quality being measured. A messy record disclosed completely is a stronger petition than a tidy one with a hole in it.

You need at least three character affidavits. This is where most people stall, so here is exactly how it works.

• Not family. No one related to you by blood or marriage can serve as a primary character reference.
• Notarized. Every one of them.
• They have to know what you were convicted of. The instructions require the letter to show knowledge of the offense. So you have to tell them, out loud, in full, before they write a word. That conversation is the hardest part of this process for most people. Have it anyway.
• Use the DOJ affidavit form if you can. It is preferred. A letter can substitute if it carries the writer's full name, address and telephone number, shows they know the offense, and bears a notarized signature.
• If you send more than three, say which three are primary.
• Warn them a federal agent may call. An agent may interview you and the people who wrote for you. Nobody should be surprised by that knock.

One more thing, and it should change who you ask. Letters from public officials and elected officeholders carry no special significance in this review. Not a mayor. Not a member of Congress. The Office is not counting titles.

So ask the person who has actually watched you for ten years. The supervisor who kept you on. The pastor. The woman who runs the pantry where you show up every Saturday. She has seen more of your character than any signature you would have had to go begging for, and on this form she counts for the same.

Then the form asks why you are asking. No attorney can write this better than you can, because they were not there.

Say what you did. Do not shade it, do not relitigate it, do not blame the lawyer you had. Then say what you have done since — in specifics, with dates and names of places. I turned my life around is worth nothing to a reviewer. I have worked at the same shop since 2014 and my supervisor's affidavit is attached is worth something.

Then say what the conviction costs you now. The license the board will not issue. The job you had to turn down. The thing your child cannot do because of your record.

Write it in your own words. If your English is imperfect, write it anyway. Nobody is grading the grammar. They are reading for whether it is true.

And keep this separate from any public account of your case. They are two different documents with two different readers. This one is addressed to the President and it is about you. A public account is addressed to everyone else and it is about what was done. Writing one into the other weakens both.

• Type it, or print in ink. Fully. Legibly.
• Notarize it. An unnotarized petition will not be considered.
• Attach whatever extra pages clarify an answer. You are allowed to.
• Do not staple, glue, bind or tape anything. That is in the instructions, and it is the kind of small thing that creates delay.
• Copy the entire packet before it leaves your hands.

Email it. The instructions say every petition except a military one should be emailed to the Office of the Pardon Attorney. The Office describes itself as a mostly digital office and prefers email for petitions, supporting documents and all correspondence. Paper is still accepted — it just takes longer, because it has to be scanned into your file before anyone reads it.

Get the application from DOJ → Office of the Pardon Attorney → Verify the address →

The Department publishes a clemency case status search. You can look yourself up by clemency case file number, by BOP register number, or by name.

It returns one of four things:

• Pending — your case is open and under review. That is all it will tell you. The details of a review are not shared with anyone, including you.
• Granted — the President granted clemency.
• Denied — the President denied it.
• Administratively closed — the Office closed the case without any presidential decision.

Read that last one carefully, because it is the one you can control. A case can be administratively closed for the petitioner's death, for foreign residency, for withdrawing the petition, for having a direct appeal underway, for clemency being unable to give the relief asked for — and for unresponsiveness.

Which means that if the Office writes to you and you do not answer, your case can close without anyone ever deciding it. Keep your address current with them. Open the mail. Answer it.

And if you search and find nothing, it means one of three things: you searched the wrong name or number, the petition was never actually filed, or the record is not there. Any of those is worth knowing today rather than in five years.

Search clemency case status →

The Office investigates. It goes to the Probation Office in the district that prosecuted you for the presentence report and the judgment, gathers your record and everything you have done since, and writes the Department's recommendation to the President through the Deputy Attorney General.

Notice whose desk that is. The office weighing whether you deserve relief sits inside the department that prosecuted you.

There is no deadline in the regulations. There is also no status. The Office does not disclose what has been done on your file or where it sits. Asked, it will confirm one thing only: whether the application is still under consideration. You find out when it is over.

Two things that matter while you wait. A petition filed under one President and still pending does not die when the administration changes — you do not start over. And you may send updated information at any time, referencing your clemency case number if you have one. A new job, a degree finished, a debt paid off: send it. It is added to your file.

So do not sit by the mailbox. File it, keep your copy, and go live your life in a way the next update to your petition could describe.

No. And you do not have to take our word for it — the Department answers this itself. Its published FAQ says the clemency process is intended to be accessible to all eligible applicants whether they have a lawyer or not, and that most people who submit clemency applications do not have one.

There is no filing fee. If a question on the form confuses you, you can email the Pardon Attorney's office and ask for clarification, though they cannot give you legal advice.

And if you send something in that is incomplete or does not answer a question well enough, the Office says it will contact you and explain what else it needs.

One mistake does not end you.

That is worth knowing, because fear of the form is what stops most people, and that fear is sold to them.

A good lawyer can help you organize a complicated record, and if you can afford one and want one, use one. But the form asks for your record, your history and your reasons. You are the only person alive who holds all three.

Nobody can buy you a place in line. There is no line to buy into.

Most petitions are denied. You should know that going in, and you should file anyway.

Not because the odds are good. Because a petition never filed is denied with certainty, and because the record you assemble — the letters, the dates, the pages proving what you have built since the worst day of your life — is worth having even before anyone in Washington reads it. It is the first time many people have ever seen their own life written down as evidence of something good.

The actual numbers: who gets clemency, and who waits →

If you are filing, you are doing it alongside thousands of people you will never meet. Forty-three of them put their records in public under their own names, with the documents attached, so that anyone could check them.

Read one. Every case is different. The process is the same, and so is the waiting.

Read the 43 cases → Where this started → #43Americans on X →

Ed Rosenberg wrote his own case down first, publicly, under his own name, and then forty-two other people recognized theirs in it. If you decide to put yours out too, that is how it goes: one, then another.

Putting your own account in public is a separate piece of work from the petition, and it has its own rules — what counts as testimony, what has to be labeled as belief, and the four things that will cost you if you write them. There is a free guide for that.

Building your story — free guide →

If you were acquitted or never charged, a pardon is the wrong instrument →

Nothing on this page is legal advice, and no one here is your lawyer. This is a description of a public process, assembled from the Office of the Pardon Attorney's published instructions and frequently asked questions. Forms, addresses and requirements change; confirm everything on justice.gov before you file. If a passage here does not match the current instructions, tell us and we will correct it.