Outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden announced Thursday that he is commuting the sentences of roughly 1,500 people who were released from prison and placed on home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic and is pardoning 39 Americans convicted of nonviolent crimes. The names of the convicts who received pardons were not released.
Clemency is the term for the power the president has to pardon, in which a person is relieved of guilt and punishment, or to commute a sentence, which reduces or eliminates the punishment but doesn’t exonerate the wrongdoing.
The US Constitution gives the president the authority to grant pardons, and toward the end of their term, presidents usually announce a series of pardons for convicted criminals. This time, the scope of the pardons and the commutation of sentences is exceptional: The White House said that this was the largest single-day act of clemency in modern American history. \
Biden's series of pardons comes more than a week after the outgoing president's controversial decision to pardon his son, Hunter. Biden's son was convicted of drug and weapons offenses, but his father pardoned him, despite promising not to interfere in the trial. The decision made by the outgoing president this month drew harsh criticism against him in the United States. Before pardoning his son, Biden had repeatedly pledged not to do so. He said in a statement explaining his reversal that the prosecution had been poisoned by politics.
Biden said he would be taking more steps in the weeks ahead and would continue to review clemency petitions.
“America was built on the promise of possibility and second chances,” Biden said in a statement. “As president, I have the great privilege of extending mercy to people who have demonstrated remorse and rehabilitation, restoring opportunity for Americans to participate in daily life and contribute to their communities, and taking steps to remove sentencing disparities for non-violent offenders, especially those convicted of drug offenses.”
The second largest single-day act of clemency was by Barack Obama, with 330, shortly before leaving office in 2017.
White House lawyers said those pardoned by Biden were convicted of non-violent crimes, such as drug offenses. Those whose sentences were commuted were those who were serving long prison sentences and were sent to house arrest during the coronavirus pandemic, when the pandemic raged in U.S. prisons and one in five prisoners contracted the virus.
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Biden and his team believe the justice system has wronged those prisoners and sentenced them to too harsh a sentence. “They have shown that they deserve a second chance,” the outgoing president said. He believes that if they were convicted today, their sentences would be shorter given the laws, policies and procedures of 2024.
Biden has promised to announce more pardons in the coming weeks. He is under pressure from advocacy groups to pardon broad swaths of people, including those on federal death row, before the Trump administration takes over in January. He’s also weighing whether to issue preemptive pardons to those who investigated Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and are facing possible retribution when he takes office.
The president had previously issued 122 commutations and 21 other pardons. He’s also broadly pardoned those convicted of use and simple possession of marijuana on federal lands and in the District of Columbia, and pardoned former U.S. service members convicted of violating a now-repealed military ban on consensual gay sex.