Holder placed criminal justice reform

Holder placed criminal justice reform at the top of that list. In a way, the memo had been prewired; in a series of quiet conversations over dinners or drinks in the White House, Obama and Holder had talked about their desire to deal with the crisis of incarceration for black men, caused in part by harsh, racially biased mandatory minimum sentences. Those conversations would ultimately lead to Holder's "Smart Crime" initiative, a comprehensive approach to making the criminal justice system fairer, and his push for Obama to grant clemency to thousands of low-level, nonviolent drug offenders sentenced under mandatory minimums. But even with strong support of the president on many of these progressive policies, Holder still regularly ran into resistance from White House operatives who fretted over the political consequences of staking out such positions. (For some in the White House, Holder could never outlive the storm he caused by using the infelicitous phrase "nation of cowards" in a Black History Month speech shortly after he became attorney general.) When Holder said he wanted to give a speech in the wake of the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who had been accused of murdering Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black 17-year-old shot in a gated Florida community, the hand wringers at the White House balked. But Obama backed his attorney general. Still, when the speech was vetted by the White House, it came back with many suggested deletions.