Nearly 25 years into a life sentence for cocaine trafficking, Teresa Griffin had come to expect that being called to the warden's office meant an update on the latest relative to pass since her incarceration at age 26.
But one day last month, far better news waited on the other end of a phone call from a Minneapolis attorney who helped file her petition for clemency.
"You're going home," said the attorney, JaneAnne Murray, before the two broke out in tears.
Griffin was one of 42 people whose federal sentences for nonviolent offenses were shortened June 3 by President Obama — a group that also included a 73-year-old Minnesota drug kingpin who had served more than 25 years.
Griffin's release marked the first victory for a recent clemency program at the University of Minnesota Law School. The program is led by Murray, a law professor who is on the steering committee set up to screen the 35,000 inmates who applied for shortened sentences after the Obama administration announced its clemency push in 2014.
Murray's program follows the example of the nation's first clemency clinic, formed by a federal prosecutor-turned-defense attorney at the University of St. Thomas in 2012. Both groups are part of a volunteer battalion of professors, attorneys and law students working to win relief for offenders who would have received far lighter sentences today.
But the volume of petitions and the bureaucratic layers that pock the path to clemency signal more work to be done in the president's final months in office.
"These are people totally forgotten by the world," Murray said.