President Biden is facing growing criticism from civil rights and criminal justice reform activists after pardoning his son, Hunter Biden, while many Black Americans continue serving time in federal facilities for nonviolent crimes.
President Biden has pardoned 26 people while in office, including his son. The number is significantly less than President-elect Trump’s 144 pardons during his first term. For some activists, the number is woefully small.
Activist Angela Rye said Biden has a responsibility to Black Americans after they helped him win the White House in 2020.
“When you consider the many ways in which Black women — Black people — carried him across the finish line, risked their very lives with the pandemic and after George Floyd’s horrible, tragic murder on camera for nine minutes and 30 seconds, he owes Black people their freedom because people trusted that he would deliver,” Rye told The Hill.
A pardon restores civil liberties and helps assuage the stigma around a federal conviction, though it doesn’t erase the crime from the record or necessarily signify innocence.
The moves can stoke controversy, as they’re often issued when presidents are on their way out the door. Biden’s late-game decision to offer Hunter Biden a full and unconditional pardon rattled Washington after he repeatedly said he would not issue a pardon for his son.
Progressive voices on Capitol Hill are now demanding President Biden forgive nonviolent offenders and inmates facing the death penalty.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) issued a call to action this week, with an emphasis on the racial disparities in the justice system. Others, like outgoing Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), criticized Biden for failing to uphold campaign promises to reduce the number of incarcerated Americans.
“Despite pledges by the president to reduce the federal prison population, it has only grown in recent years,” Bush said at a press conference on Tuesday.
“President Biden has an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the federal prison population and make good on his campaign promise to address the systemic injustices of mass incarceration before leaving office. With the stroke of a pen, the president can offer these individuals the dignity and redemption they deserve. We urge him to act now.”
Black Americans make up around 14 percent of the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, but 39 percent of people incarcerated, per the Bureau of Prisons.
Research has also long shown Black Americans disproportionately face more severe sentencing compared to their white counterparts. A five-year analysis from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, released last year, found that Black men received sentences roughly 13 percent longer than white men, and Black men and women were both less likely than white Americans to receive probation. Hispanic Americans were similarly disproportionately affected.
As of 2022, more than half of inmates serving life without parole were Black, according to data from the American Civil Liberties Union — as were 65 percent of those serving life for nonviolent offenses.
Pressed about the disparities faced by Black men in light of the latest pardon, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said last week that “there’s a process” and promised that more pardons are to come before Biden leaves office.
“We’re trying to figure out the next steps in this, and you’ll hear from the president on this in the next couple of weeks,” Jean-Pierre said, pointing to Biden’s past pardons as a sign of commitment.
Despite nearly 1,500 pardon requests so far, according to statistics from the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, Biden has “just not really met the moment yet on clemency,” said Daniel Landsman, vice president of policy at the Families Against Mandatory Minimums Foundation.
This moment, Landsman added, “represents his last opportunity to really cement a legacy on criminal justice reform that he can point at and say, ‘here was my contribution to this field.’”
In the closing days of the Biden administration, there was always going to be a push for clemencies, Landsman said, but the Hunter Biden pardon “adds a new, interesting layer to the push.”
“What we're asking is, in essence, for him to extend the same emotions ... coming into him as he looks at his son's conviction and applying that to thousands of American families,” Landsman said.
The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, which is running a petition asking Biden to commute unfair sentences before his term ends on Jan. 20, is “really optimistic and hopeful” that more clemencies will come down the pipeline before President Biden leaves office, said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director of the center's justice program.
Granting clemencies “is one of the most important efforts that this administration can do before President Trump takes office,” Eisen said. “And that’s because an executive order can be rescinded, but grants of clemency, pardon or commutations, can’t be.”
Advocates for the incarcerated have expressed concern over the incoming Trump administration given its use of the death penalty.
In the final months of Trump’s first term, his administration executed 13 people, more than any administration in more than 120 years.
The Trump administration also amended the federal execution protocol, which opened the door to harsher methods of execution, including death by firing squad, electrocution and nitrogen hypoxia.
During his 2020 campaign, President Biden said he opposed the death penalty and vowed to abolish the practice. Under his administration, the Justice Department halted federal executions but continued defending existing death sentences and seeking new ones.
There are currently 40 Americans in federal death row, and Black Americans account for 40 percent of them. In general, Black defendants are more than four times more likely to be sentenced to death than non-Black defendants.
“State-sanctioned murder is not justice, and President Biden has an opportunity and an obligation to save lives and make good on his campaign promise to address the federal death penalty before leaving office,” Pressley said at a press conference on Tuesday.
