New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy says he’s planning clemencies that will ultimately affect thousands of people — prioritizing groups such as victims of domestic or sexual violence who were convicted of crimes against their abusers.

Murphy told Gothamist this week that he wasn’t planning to announce any pardons or commutations at a special Juneteenth announcement at the St. James A.M.E. Church in Newark, where he would roll out the clemency program. But he did say he planned to sign an executive order on Wednesday that would set out different factors for expedited clemency review.

The order was also expected to establish a clemency advisory board to work with his administration and determine if a clemency application deserves to be expedited for governor’s approval. The board will be chaired by former Biden White House lawyer Justin Dews and include attorneys, criminal justice experts, a representative of the attorney general’s office and the bishop of a Jersey City church, who also serves as a chaplain for the city’s police force.

Since taking office in 2018, Murphy has not taken clemency actions, neither through reducing prisoners’ sentences or granting pardons. But Murphy said he hoped to start granting clemency approvals “sooner rather than later.”

“Realistically, probably measured in months, but we’re not going to let any grass grow,” he said.

The governor’s administration said it would prioritize categories of people, including those serving unduly long sentences because they rejected plea deals and took their chances at trial and people who committed crimes for acts that are no longer illegal or that now lead to shorter sentences. In particular, Murphy said, people who were given what would now be considered extreme sentences when they were under 25 years old would be given special clemency consideration.

He said there are already 500 to 700 people who have applied for clemency before the program’s announcement, and who will be eligible under categories the administration plans to prioritize.

“Whether by the end of the year or not …this will impact thousands of individuals and then many more folks in the families of those individuals,” he said.

Murphy said the advisory board will review each case and make recommendations to his front office team. The governor will still make the final decision in every case, he said.

Murphy said one of the challenges with granting clemencies to date has been a “central repository” of applications for the administration to review. He also planned to roll out a website on Wednesday that he said would help automate the application process at nj.gov/clemency. He said it would offer a more “straightforward application process as opposed to something you might have seen 40 or 50 years ago.”

The governor said he will also prioritize pardon applications for certain groups of people who have completed their sentences and been released from prison — for example, people who have been out of prison for five to 10 years and were only convicted of non-violent crimes could be eligible for an expedited reviews to have their sentences wiped away.

Amol Sinha, director for ACLU New Jersey, which worked closely with Murphy’s team on the rollout of the program, said the governor has laid out “a vision for something that could be revolutionary and game-changing” for clemency.

“He’s looking proactively for the categories of people who should no longer be incarcerated and no longer suffer the collateral consequences of their convictions. And that’s really something that should be applauded,” he said.

Sinha said the amount of people affected could be a “huge number.”

“It could be well into the thousands of people who will no longer suffer the harms of an unjust sentence,” he said. “As we’ve been saying, clemency is about more than just a vehicle for mercy. It’s a tool that can be used to address mass incarceration.”

The ACLU director touted that New Jersey has reduced its prison population by “over 50% since 2011 and over 35% just in the years of the pandemic alone.”

In February 2024, the New Jersey ACLU launched The Clemency Project to begin identifying and meeting with incarcerated people who fall into the categories the administration plans to prioritize.

“What we were saying was, let’s not wait until the sympathetic story or the politically connected person comes your way, but rather let’s be proactive about it and build a framework around clemency so that we can find the categories of people that should no longer be incarcerated,” Sinha said.

Sinha said the ACLU began talking to the governor’s team well before the launch of the program.

“We had been working for well over a year to encourage Gov. Murphy to take a categorical approach to clemency,” he said.

Murphy first announced during his State of the State address in January that he would undertake a new clemency initiative “that will ensure we live up to our promise as the state for second chances.”

“Somebody recently wrote that I had gone the longest of any governor in the state’s history … without pardoning anybody, and that’s probably true. That’s going to change,” he said last week on WNYC’s “Ask Governor Murphy” call-in show.

Murphy’s predecessor, former Gov. Chris Christie, issued 55 clemency orders throughout his time in office. The recipients included a repeat campaign donor who’d been convicted of arson and unlawful sale of a weapon, as well as a woman who said she’d been battered before stabbing her fiancé to death. Christie, a former federal prosecutor, also commuted sentences for several people convicted of gun possession crimes.

In New Jersey, only 105 people have been granted clemency since 1994.

Murphy said any criticism of his lack of pardons or commuted sentences to this point in his term was like “saying that the score early in the fourth quarter is the final score. There’s lots of football left to be played.”

“When we walk out of here, I think we will have been historic,” he said.