Fairness in Restitution: A Town Hall with RemissionNow

We were honored to host the RemissionNow campaign, four women carrying federal restitution orders, as our November 2023 White Collar Support Group Tuesday Night Speaker Series presenters. Tanya R. Pierce, Elise Roper, Roxanne Jackson and Cassandra Owens, joined by Dr. Topeka K. Sam of The Ladies of Hope Ministries, held a town hall on what a restitution order does to a life after release, what remission is, and what the Fairness in Restitution Act of 2023 would change. You can watch the full recording above.

Every woman on this panel came home years ago. None of them is finished. The dollar figure in a federal judgment is the piece of a sentence most likely to outlast the rest of it, and nobody in the room when it is set says so. This hour is for defendants, for the families who live inside that number, and for the lawyers who agree to it.

Why a restitution order outlives the prison sentence

The arithmetic is the argument. Elise Roper served nine months for mail fraud and owes at least $5 million. Roxanne Jackson served 17 months and owes $1 million. Cassandra Owens went to Danbury on a wire fraud conviction, 87 months and a $1.2 million judgment. Tanya Pierce went to trial on a $35,000 loss and walked out owing $2.5 million.

Roxanne’s lawyers told her the amount did not matter because nobody ever pays restitution, so she took the million to be done with it. What waits on the other side is mundane and relentless. The number lands on your credit report. Banks decline to open accounts. Cards close after a background check. Elise is an attorney and cannot trade stocks.

Then there is the part that is not mundane at all. Cassandra was at a camp, and she did everything required to earn a pass to her daughter’s kindergarten graduation.

She says, I didn’t realize you had 1.2 million dollars of restitution and you would be considered a danger to society if we let you out.

Cassandra Owens

The ABA Criminal Justice Section walked our group through the wider version of this, the collateral consequences of a white collar conviction. This is that, with a dollar sign on it.

Can a federal restitution order ever be reduced or erased?

Two rights run through this hour, and neither reliably reaches the people who hold it. The first is a hearing under the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act. Cassandra got one after her case was remanded, and her order fell from $1.2 million to roughly $247,000. She calls that a lottery win and means it as an indictment. Tanya had the same right, waived without her knowledge, and found out seven years too late.

The second is remission, a form of clemency that erases a restitution debt outright. Elise found out it existed in 2021, on a Facebook Live she was hosting, from her own criminal defense attorney.

he actually mentioned that there was a way to get rid of restitution, call remission. None of us had ever heard of that. I don’t know why he didn’t tell me about that since he was my attorney.

Elise Roper

By her count it has been granted perhaps 30 or 35 times since 1930. What the campaign did with that, and how a handful of women with restitution orders ended up briefing the Office of the Pardon Attorney, is the stretch of this recording worth the hour. Professor Mark Osler and Rachel Barkow have walked our group through the machinery behind a request like that.

What the Fairness in Restitution Act would change

Dr. Sam put the campaign in touch with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, which drafted the bill and finished it two months before this town hall. Tanya read the statutes it amends aloud for the Columbia Law School class on the call, and was emphatic about why. This is not about relitigating anybody’s case.

Three provisions give you the shape of the rest. The government would have to show actual loss sustained by a victim as a direct and proximate result of what the defendant did. Joint and several liability would be eliminated, so you answer for your own harm and not the group’s. The statutory period would fall from 20 years to 10, which Elise said alone would let her breathe again.

The panel is deliberately careful about victims. One member has paid every month since 2015 and gets a printout from the court each year. There has never been a disbursement in her case. The money leaves her and stops. The Women’s White Collar Defense Association covered these statutes with our group from the defense side.

Someone asked in chat what the odds of passage are. Dr. Topeka K. Sam has helped move 12 pieces of legislation nationally and worked on provisions of the First Step Act. Her answer closes the hour.

About the RemissionNow Panel

Tanya R. Pierce, MBA co-founded RemissionNow and leads its strategic and legislative planning. She has over 20 years in real estate development and founded Life Unbolted, which supports people impacted by the federal carceral system. Elise Roper, the campaign’s chairwoman, was managing partner of a small minority law firm in Chicago. Roxanne Jackson is from Illinois. Cassandra Owens was a practicing attorney and managing partner of a general practice, and works today as a nurse and a paralegal. Dr. Topeka K. Sam founded The Ladies of Hope Ministries, which sponsors the campaign. She builds the platform, she said, and the sisters use their own voices on it.