Mark William Osler (born 1963) is an American legal scholar and prosecutor. Osler currently serves as Deputy County Attorney for Hennepin County, Minnesota, supervising criminal prosecutions. Prior to his appointment in 2023 by County Attorney Mary Moriarty, he was a law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, Minnesota, holding the Robert and Marion Short Distinguished Chair in Law at St. Thomas and the Ruthie Mattox Chair of Preaching at First Covenant Church, Minneapolis. He began work as a law professor at Baylor University in 2000 before leaving for St. Thomas in 2010. At St. Thomas, he founded the nation's first law school clinic on federal commutations, and he has advocated for an expansive use of the presidential pardon power. His work has been profiled by The American Prospect, Rolling Stone and CBS News.
Background, education and early career
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Osler's family later moved to Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan. He attended Grosse Pointe North High School, where he worked on the school newspaper with future AP White House reporter Ron Fournier. He subsequently matriculated at the College of William & Mary, graduating in 1985. Osler received his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1990 and clerked for District Court Judge Jan DuBois in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania before returning to Detroit. There, he worked from 1992-1995 for the law firm of Dykema Gossett, and then as an Assistant United States Attorney from 1995-2000.
Baylor Law School (2000-2010) Osler's scholarship and advocacy at Baylor focused on capital punishment and narcotics policy. Some of Osler's work addressed sentencing issues involving crack cocaine. In 2009, Osler won the case (through a 6-3 summary and per curiam decision) of Spears v. United States in the United States Supreme Court, which reversed the Eighth Circuit and clarified a prior sentencing decision, declaring that sentencing judges could "categorically" reject the 100-to-1 ration between powder and crack cocaine which was then embedded in the federal sentencing guidelines. The character of "Professor Joe Fisher" in the film American Violet is based on Osler's work with the ACLU and former student David Moore in confronting unjust crack prosecutions in the city of Hearne, Texas. While at Baylor, Osler published Jesus on Death Row (Abingdon, 2009), which critiques capital punishment in the United States through an examination of the biblical account of Jesus Christ's trial and execution.
Osler was named the 2009 Wacoan of the Year.
University of St. Thomas School of Law (2010-present) Moving to St. Thomas in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Osler's work moved increasingly towards clemency. He was chosen as "Professor of the Year" in 2016, 2019, and 2022.
Following up on Jesus on Death Row, between 2011 and 2014, Osler and collaborators produced a dramatic "Sentencing of Jesus" in eleven states: Texas, Colorado, California, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Illinois, Virginia, Louisiana, Arizona, and Minnesota. His 2016 book, Prosecuting Jesus recounts that project.
Osler's most recent work has focused on clemency and narcotics policy. His opinion pieces (some co-authored) appeared in The New York Times in 2014, 2016, and 2021, and in the Washington Post in 2014, 2018, August, 2020, and November, 2020, while his arguments in favor of narcotics policy reform appeared in law journals at Harvard, Stanford, Georgetown, Rutgers, and DePaul. An article Osler co-authored with Rachel Barkow for the University of Chicago Law Review was highlighted in a lead editorial in The New York Times, in which the Times' editorial board expressly embraced Barkow and Osler's argument for clemency reform. In 2020, the Times again described the Barkow/Osler plan in a staff editorial. He and Barkow also co-founded the Clemency Resource Center at NYU, a pop-up law firm which hired and trained lawyers for a one-year stint representing clemency petitioners during the heart of the Obama Clemency Initiative.
In 2020, 2022 and 2023, Osler testified before subcommittees of the United States House Judiciary Committee on various aspects of clemency.
He has also commented on the death penalty and other issues for CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ESPN, and the Huffington Post. Osler appeared as a critic of narcotics policy in the 2013 National Geographic series "The 80's," and as a commentator in the 2014 National Geographic series "The Jesus Mysteries." He is a founding member of Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, a national group of former and current prosecutors and police chiefs.