President Joe Biden of the United States is granting clemency to approximately 1500 individuals who were let out of prison and put under home confinement due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Additionally, he is pardoning 39 Americans who were convicted of nonviolent offenses. This marks the most extensive single-day clemency initiative in recent times.
The pardons announced on a recent Thursday are for individuals who have completed their home confinement terms, having spent at least one year under this arrangement after their release. Prisons were particularly hard-hit by the spread of the coronavirus, leading to the early release of some inmates in an effort to contain the virus. At a certain point, The Associated Press reported that one out of every five prisoners had contracted COVID-19.
Biden has expressed his intention to take further actions in the coming weeks and to continue examining requests for clemency. The second largest single-day clemency grant in history was carried out by Barack Obama, who pardoned 330 individuals just before the end of his presidential term in 2017.
Representative Jim McGovern, and 34 other lawmakers are urging the president to pardon environmental and human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, who was imprisoned or under house arrest for three years because of a contempt of court charge related to his work representing Indigenous farmers in a lawsuit against Chevron.
Others are advocating for Biden to commute the sentences of federal death row prisoners. His attorney general, Merrick Garland, paused federal executions. Biden had said on the campaign trail in 2020 that he wanted to end the death penalty but he never did, and now, with Trump coming back into office, it’s likely executions will resume. During his first term, Trump presided over an unprecedented number of federal executions, carried out during the height of the pandemic.
More pardons are coming before Biden leaves office on January 20, but it’s not clear whether he’ll take action to guard against possible prosecution by Trump, an untested use of the power. The president has been taking the idea seriously and has been thinking about it for as much as six months — before the presidential election — but has been concerned about the precedent it would set, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions.
But those who received the pardons would have to accept them. New California Senator Adam Schiff, who was the chairman of the congressional committee that investigated the violent January 6 insurrection, said such a pardon from Biden would be “unnecessary”, and that the president shouldn’t be spending his waning days in office worrying about this.
A president has the power to both pardon, in which a person is relieved of guilt and punishment, or commute a sentence, which reduces or eliminates the punishment but doesn’t exonerate the wrongdoing. It’s customary for a president to grant mercy at the end of his term, using the power of the office to wipe away records or end prison terms.
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. The decision prompted criminal justice advocates and lawmakers to put additional public pressure on the administration to use that same power for everyday Americans. It wasn’t a very popular move; only about two in 10 Americans approved of his decision, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
