Biden Faces Mounting Pressure To Clear Federal Death Row and Issue More Commutations After Pardoning His Son
A broad array of advocacy organizations and religious groups—including the Vatican—are urging President Joe Biden to commute the sentences of several groups of federal prisoners before he leaves office, such as death row inmates, marijuana offenders, and women who were sexually assaulted in federal prisons.
Biden issued a broad pardon to his son Hunter last week, leading clemency experts and civil liberties groups to ask the obvious question.
“What about everyone else?” says Mark Osler, a clemency advocate and professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law. “They could have positioned this as a principled act that covered hundreds of people who were targeted by zealous prosecutors. There is still time for Biden to mitigate the damage to his legacy that this does, but he will have to make a significant effort.”
While Biden has previously announced categorical pardons of low-level federal marijuana offenders, his administration still frequently disappointed criminal justice advocates who were hoping for more based on his 2020 campaign platform. After years of inaction from Biden, the pardon of his son stood out even more.
“While I can understand a father wanting to save his son from injustice, we expect a president to have that perspective for everyone’s children,” says Rachel Barkow, a professor at the NYU School of Law. “It’s the singling out of only his child and his abysmal record for everyone else (at least to this point) that is so jarring. Where’s the compassion and the mercy for all the other people who are serving excessive sentences or were unjustly prosecuted or sentenced harshly?”
As Barkow and Osler noted in a New York Times op-ed they co-wrote in September, Biden has the lowest rate of pardons of any modern U.S. president since Richard Nixon.
Whether Biden improves his record is not a statistical question for the 40 inmates on federal death row, but a matter of life and death. Before Donald Trump left the Oval Office in 2021, his administration embarked on a six-month execution spree, killing 13 prisoners.
Biden campaigned in 2020 on ending the federal death penalty, but once in office that promise was quickly forgotten. While it imposed a moratorium on executions, the Justice Department continued to seek capital punishment in two mass-murder cases. It would be an act of e
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