Roberto Garza has served 122 months of a life sentence in the federal prison system because more than a decade ago he was involved in the cultivation of marijuana and its sale to individuals who desired for their own personal reasons to buy and use the marijuana Garza sold. 

There is no dispute that it was a crime to sell marijuana and Garza is deeply remorseful for the life path he chose to reach this point. But, there is something to be said for the power of individual change and notions of justice and fairness in a case where society decides that what was once illegal should be so no more.

Beginning in late 2014 the United States Congress, as signed into law by the President of the United States, prohibited and defunded the U.S. Department of Justice and its umbrella of law enforcement agencies, from using federal funds to prosecute marijuana crimes in states where legalization (whether medical or recreational) has been decided by the voters or elected officials to proceed to decriminalization. While Congress has yet to repeal criminalization of marijuana at the federal level, no longer does it allow federal agencies to prosecute Marijuana crimes in those locations. This means life in prison is a matter of geography and the will and caprice of prosecutors now, and a matter of mere feet can separate a persons lawful sale and use of marijuana being a non-prosecutable act and a life sentence. See 2015 Pub. L. No. 113-235 (2014)(continued since 2019 H.R. 21 at 537 (2019). This is fundamentally unfair.

Today Garza lives in a vulnerable position unable to receive basic medical care for a kidney transplant, partial blindness and is in a prison designated by federal government agencies as one of the greatest healthcare provider shortage areas in the United States. The federal judiciary is unsympathetic and leaves it to the White House now to show mercy to men like Garza who will die in prison for marijuana offenses the law and Congress no longer allow to be prosecuted for millions of Americans like him who live in non-prosecutable states. Fairness dictates that his request for executive clemency be granted immediately absolving his actions from further punishment so that he can move on in life and bring justice to what is fundamentally and unjust sentence where the same conduct today in a state where it has been decriminalized would mean Garza could not even be arrested.

Sign the petition today, and ask Attorney General Merrick Garland and President Joseph R. Biden to grant Garza the clemency, mercy and justice he so clearly deserves.