President Joe Biden announced a historic mass clemency this week, commuting the sentences of 1,500 nonviolent offenders who were previously transferred from prison to house arrest as part of a COVID pandemic measure to reduce the risk of infection in federal prisons.
But it's unclear whether the president reviewed all the cases he commuted because, according to CNN, two of them in particular were infamous public corruption cases — and the commutations have spurred outrage in affected communities.
The first was former Pennsylvania Judge Michael Conahan, who "was convicted in 2011 in what was infamously called the 'kids-for-cash' scandal, where he took kickbacks from for-profit detention centers in exchange for wrongly sending juveniles to their facilities. The case was widely considered to be one of the worst judicial scandals in Pennsylvania history ... The misconduct of Conahan and another Luzerne County judge led the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to throw out 4,000 juvenile convictions, and the discredited state judges were ordered to pay $200 million to the victims."
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The case became well known, inspiring an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
The other case involved former Dixon, Illinois, comptroller Rita Crundwell.
"She pleaded guilty in 2012 to a $54 million embezzlement scheme, which was believed to be the largest municipal fraud in US history. She was sentenced to almost 20 years in prison, nearly the maximum, though she moved to house arrest during the pandemic."
Conahan and Crundwell were already set to be released in 2026 and 2028, respectively. But the shortening of their sentences sparked condemnation.
Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) said in a statement, “I do feel strongly that President Biden got it absolutely wrong and created a lot of pain here in northeastern Pennsylvania.”
Former DOJ pardon attorney Margaret Love told CNN that Biden wasn't the only one who erred — the root of the problem was the unfair way sentences were reduced under Trump administration COVID policy in the first place.
“Many people who were sent home were convicted of white-collar or nonviolent offenses and were considered safe bets to behave in the community,” she said — without much thought for exactly how severe those offenses were, just whether they were violent or nonviolent.
Those angered by Biden's commutations now “should have complained four years ago when they were released from prison,” she added.
