President Barack Obama granted nine pardons Friday following criticism of his failure to use the authority.

The editorial page of the The Los Angeles Times and Margaret Colgate Love, the top Justice Department adviser on pardons from 1990 to 1997, both recently urged Obama to use his clemency power to correct injustices in the justice system.

Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did not grant any pardons until at least a year into their presidencies. Noting the corny practice of pardoning a turkey for Thanksgiving, Love lamented in a Washington Post op-ed last month that the “jet-age turkey-pardoning is preferred over the more venerable practice of pardoning human beings.”

Clinton issued more than 40 pardons when he first used his clemency power in November 1994. Bush granted seven of them when he first invoked the authority in December 2002. Pardons can be controversial.

On his way out of office in 2000, Clinton fueled a political uproar when he granted indicted fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich a pardon that was approved by then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder. Rich’s former wife had been a Democratic party donor and Clinton friend.

Like Clinton and Bush, Obama used his clemency power for the first time to pardon individuals who were generally sentenced for minor crimes committed many years before he took office.

Here is the complete list from the Justice Department:

• James Bernard Banks – Liberty, Utah

• Offense: Illegal possession of government property; 18 U.S.C. § 641.

• Sentence: Oct. 31, 1972; District of Utah; two years of probation.

• Russell James Dixon – Clayton, Ga.

• Offense: Felony liquor law violation; 26 U.S.C. § 5604(a)(1).

• Sentence: June 23, 1960; Northern District of Georgia; two years of probation.

• Laurens Dorsey – Syracuse, N.Y.

• Offense: Conspiracy to defraud the United States by making false statements to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; 18 U.S.C. §§ 371, 1001.

• Sentence: Aug. 31, 1998; District of New Jersey; five years of probation and $71,000 restitution.

• Ronald Lee Foster – Beaver Falls, Penn.

• Offense: Mutilation of coins; 18 U.S.C. § 331.

• Sentence: Oct. 4, 1963; Eastern District of North Carolina; one year of probation and $20 fine.

• Timothy James Gallagher – Navasota, Texas

• Offense: Conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute cocaine; 21 U.S.C. § 846.

• Sentence: Oct. 18, 1982; District of Arizona; three years of probation.

• Roxane Kay Hettinger – Powder Springs, Ga.

• Offense: Conspiracy to distribute cocaine; 21 U.S.C. §§ 841(a)(1) and 846.

• Sentence: March 31, 1986; Northern District of Iowa; 30 days in jail followed by three years of probation.

• Edgar Leopold Kranz Jr. – Minot, N.D.

• Offense: Wrongful use of cocaine, adultery and writing three insufficient fund checks; Articles 112a and 134, Uniform Code of Military Justice.

• Sentence: Sept. 14, 1994, as approved Nov. 4, 1994; General court-martial convened at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii; bad conduct discharge (suspended), 24 months of confinement and reduction to pay grade E-1.

• Floretta Leavy - Rockford, Ill.

• Offense: Distribution of cocaine, conspiracy to distribute cocaine, possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, and possession of cocaine with intent to distribute; 21 U.S. C. §§ 841(a)(1), (a)(2) and 846, 18 U.S.C. § 2.

• Sentence: Oct. 19, 1984; District of Kansas; one year and one day in prison and three years of special parole.

• Scoey Lathaniel Morris – Crosby, Texas

• Offense: Passing counterfeit obligations or securities; 18 U.S.C. §§ 472 and 2.

• Sentence: May 21, 1999; Western District of Texas; three years of probation and $1,200 restitution, jointly and severally.

A Supreme Court justice’s observations about a dearth of commutations in recent years and a high-profile whistleblower’s clemency petition have breathed new life into a public discussion about reforming the pardon program.

Meeting behind closed doors, Justice Department and White House officials have been considering changes to the system since the start of the Obama administration, though the White House appears to have scaled back its ambitions after key personnel changes.

Former White House Counsel Greg Craig, now a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, led a push for major reforms before stepping down last November, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. He received support from then-Deputy Attorney General David Ogden, who recently returned to his practice at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, the individuals said.

Attorney General Eric Holder — whose involvement in the controversial pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich at the end of the Clinton administration threatened his career — also expressed interest in making the clemency program “more systematic,” said one of the individuals.

The Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney receives clemency applications and makes recommendations to the White House via the Office of the Deputy Attorney General. A backlog in the pardon office, coupled with fewer clemency grants in recent years, has driven applicants to reach out to the White House directly.

Some critics say the current system is obsolete because it provides the president with no assurances that his grants will be free of political consequences. Meanwhile, they say, a tool used in the past to “correct injustices that the ordinary criminal process seems unable or unwilling to consider,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy once wrote, has fallen into disuse.

An idea favored by Craig was the creation of a blue-ribbon commission or an advisory process inside the Justice Department but apart from the pardon attorney, the people said. After he stepped down in November, however, discussions turned to developing criteria under which clemency petitions should be granted in the existing program.

“Like every administration, we are updating the policy guidance for DOJ on requests for executive clemency,” a White House official said.

Craig and Ogden declined to comment. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment while the policy was under review.

The clemency issue gained attention after the Supreme Court heard arguments last month in Dillon v. U.S., a case brought by a federal prisoner who was sentenced in 1993 to 27 years behind bars for trafficking in crack cocaine.

Percy Dillon, described as a model prisoner, asked the court to decide whether the U.S. Sentencing Commission erred in limiting federal judges’ discretion in new sentencing hearings under Congress’ 2007 reduction in the crack guidelines. A federal judge had called his original sentence “unfair” and “entirely too high.”

At one point, Justice Kennedy asked the government’s lawyer whether the Justice Department ever recommends clemency for prisoners like Dillon. He also questioned whether the lack of commutations last year and the five the year before signaled that “something is not working in the system.”

Margaret Love, a solo practitioner who was pardon attorney in the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations, wrote on the American Constitution Society’s blog that the government’s inability to respond to Kennedy’s question “spoke volumes about the deteriorated state of the Justice Department’s clemency program.”

Jenner & Block LLP partner Kenneth Lee, a former White House associate counsel who assisted President George W. Bush with presidential pardons, called on President Barack Obama to make immediate use of his clemency powers.

“Obama should not hesitate or further delay exercising this power with vigor,” he wrote in an April 12 op-ed in The National Law Journal.

The next week, an ex-banker who blew the whistle on mass tax evasion at Swiss bank UBS AG filed a clemency petition, again nudging the issue to the forefront. Bradley Birkenfeld, whom the Justice Department said was crucial to its investigation, is seeking a reduction to time served on his 40-month prison sentence for a fraud conspiracy conviction.

His lawyer, Dean Zerbe, said Birkenfeld’s role in the massive tax case presented a question of policy that made him an attractive candidate for clemency: whether the federal government is sending mixed messages by seeking prison time for a tax whistleblower while encouraging whistleblowers to come forward in its aggressive pursuit of offshore tax evaders.

“Brad certainly provides a good case that reasonable people can look at and say, ‘Let’s think this through and see what we accomplished here,’” said Zerbe, of Zerbe, Fingeret, Frank and Jadav. But Zerbe acknowledged that seeking a commutation “is certainly not an easy road for folks, and it’s an even tougher road for folks who haven’t finished their sentence.”

The Justice Department is fighting to keep secret the names of 9,200 individuals denied clemency by President George W. Bush, Politico’s Under The Radar blog reported Monday.

Last year, a judge for the U.S. District Court for D.C. ruled that the Office of Pardon Attorney, a DOJ component, must disclose to former Washington Post reporter George Lardner Jr. the name of thousands of individuals whose applications for pardons and commutations were denied. But the Justice Department appealed.

“Pardon and commutation applicants have a substantial privacy interest in nondisclosure of the fact that they have unsuccessfully sought clemency,” the DOJ wrote in a brief opposing Lardner’s request. “The substantial privacy interest of the clemency applicants outweighs the negligible public interest in disclosure of their names.”

Although the DOJ is fighting against disclosure of the complete list, it has verified the names of pardon applicants and the standing of their applications, including denials. The DOJ argued that releasing all of the names would be an invasion of privacy and could harm the applicants.

“Disclosure of the fact that individual offenders have unsuccessfully sought pardons or commutations unquestionably will re-stigmatize the applicants and draw renewed attention to their offenses, thereby harming their prospects for successful rehabilitation and reintegration into the community, as well as possibly subjecting them to the risk of retaliation,” the DOJ wrote.

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