Professor Robert Weisberg weighs in on the possibility that President Obama will grant clemency to condemned prisoners before leaving office for The San Francisco Chronicle.

President Obama told an interviewer last month that the death penalty in the United States is “deeply troubling” — plagued by long delays, some gruesome executions, and findings of innocence on Death Row — and he may take some executive action before leaving office.

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Obama didn’t say what he’s considering. But a plausible interpretation of his words foreshadows a dramatic end-of-term action: a grant of clemency to some or all of the 62 condemned federal prisoners. It is a step that has been taken at the state level in recent decades by a half-dozen governors but never by a U.S. president.

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It is “a quantitatively small gesture that could make the point he’d want to make,” said Stanford Law Professor Robert Weisberg, co-director of the law school’s Criminal Justice Center and a veteran death penalty lawyer. Like other commentators, he offered no prediction of what action Obama would take, but said the president would probably wait until after the November 2016 election, to avoid voter reaction against whoever the Democratic candidate is.

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For death penalty supporters, Tsarnaev “would be their poster child” if Obama granted across-the-board clemency, said Stanford’s Weisberg. But he said the president shouldn’t be deterred, because “the subject has less juice than it used to.”