Kansas Democrat Senate nominee Adam Hamilton served on a Barack Obama advisory council that recommended expanding eligibility for presidential commutations and pardons and considering targeted categorical grants of commutations and pardons, years before several people whose sentences Obama commuted faced new criminal cases involving murder, oxycodone pills containing fentanyl, and cocaine intended for sale.
Hamilton, the founding and senior pastor of the Church of the Resurrection who is challenging incumbent Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), served on President Barack Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
In a 2016 report, Strengthening Efforts to Increase Opportunity and End Poverty, the council recommended that Obama “expand eligibility to receive commutations and pardons” and consider “Targeted Categorical Grants” while looking for ways to streamline the clemency process. All members of the council except Naseem Kourosh, who abstained, voted to make the recommendations to Obama and his administration.
The report specifically praised results from Obama’s Clemency Initiative, a program announced in 2014 under which certain incarcerated people could apply to be pardoned or receive a commuted sentence if they would have received a shorter sentence if convicted at the time, had served at least ten years of their total sentence, maintained good conduct throughout their prison term, and did not have a violent past record or ties to drug cartels.
“The outcomes of this program have already been favorable and we encourage the Administration to explore options to expand these efforts even further,” the council wrote.
“In view of the purposes of clemency and the unconscionable sentences that have routinely been handed out in the last few decades, we recommend that the President expand the swath of cases eligible under his program and strive to reduce the burden to file and to process these applications,” the report continued.
The council also asked Obama to consider “a Targeted Categorical Grant of commutations and pardons to specific sets of prisoners and former prisoners,” pointing to broad grants previously issued by Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
The report said the administration could identify categories of offenders whose sentences were, by definition, too long for their crimes and others who, after serving time, had reintegrated sufficiently to merit removal of the “cloud of conviction.”
Several people whose sentences Obama commuted later faced new criminal cases, including Alton Mills, who was accused of murder in an Illinois road-rage shooting; Joseph Burgos, who was charged after investigators said they found 1,983 oxycodone pills containing 212 grams of fentanyl; and Bobby Gill, who was sentenced to five years in federal prison after pleading guilty in a cocaine case.
Illinois State Police accused Mills of killing Linda Chatman during an Interstate 57 road-rage incident in Posen.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, police said Mills became “angry that the victim cut him off” before firing three times into her vehicle. Chatman was struck in the head and killed.
At a detention hearing, a judge denied Mills’s request to be released while awaiting trial on a murder charge.
Burgos subsequently became a suspect in a drug-trafficking investigation.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the Drug Enforcement Administration wiretapped Burgos’s phone during the investigation. On April 13, 2019, his phone registered in Midland, Texas, and DEA agents saw him heading toward Chicago before stopping him at the Greyhound bus station.
Investigators said they found 1,983 oxycodone pills containing 212 grams of fentanyl.
Burgos had two previous federal drug convictions, including one in the early 1990s that resulted in a 360-month prison sentence. That sentence was commuted in 2015.
Burgos was charged in 2020 with distribution of a controlled substance and was being held at the Winnebago County Jail in Rockford at the time of the 2023 Chicago Sun-Times report.
Gill had served approximately 25 years behind bars before returning home in 2015. According to the San Antonio Express-News, Obama’s clemency initiative freed 1,715 federal inmates as part of a broader criminal justice reform effort.
Twenty-one months later, Gill was arrested again after authorities found him in possession of more than two pounds of cocaine they alleged he intended to sell.
Gill pleaded guilty to charges related to the arrest and was sentenced in 2018 to five years in federal prison, with credit for time served since February.
The council’s clemency recommendation was not Hamilton’s only involvement in an Obama-era report addressing criminal justice and immigration issues.
The Obama faith-based advisory council also discussed immigration in a January 2016 report, stating, “The failure to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants has denied countless hardworking people opportunities to earn a living, support their families, and advance their education in this country.” The report further said immigration enforcement could separate parents from children and impose economic hardships on mixed-status families.
Hamilton also said in January that if the ICE protests and enforcement actions he described in Minneapolis occurred in Kansas City, he would “want to be out there with people” protesting.
Breitbart News reported on October 14 that Hamilton voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election and contributed $500 to her campaign on July 23, 2024, two days after President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid. Hamilton said he was drawn to Harris in part by a concern for “the weak, the vulnerable” and said “justice weighs heavily for me,” while describing President Donald Trump as a “disrupter” whose decision-making concerned him. Hamilton also said the events of January 6 were a “disqualifier” for Trump from his perspective, though he added after Trump’s election that he would pray for him and “do the best I can to be supportive.”
