Joe Biden substituted imprisonment with home confinement for 1,500 offenders and granted clemency to 39 individuals
On December 12, US President Joe Biden enacted a decree to change jail terms to home detention for 1,500 convicts and permanently pardon a further 39.
This is documented on the White House official page.
The account clarifies that the sentence reductions impacted 1,500 inmates serving extended prison terms, “many of whom would have faced more lenient sentencing had their trials occurred under present-day laws, guidelines, and practices.” They had previously been placed under house arrest during the COVID-19 crisis and have “effectively reintegrated into their households and locales, demonstrating their worthiness of a second opportunity.” The pardoned prisoners have also shown significant improvement in their rehabilitation. They were convicted of non-violent offenses, with at least some involving drug-related infractions. Details, including names, of those pardoned were not specified.
As per the Associated Press, this action constituted the most sizable individual pardon of prisoners in US history, the preceding one happening in 2017, during Barack Obama’s presidency — he too, shortly before his departure from office, commuted the sentences of 330 persons. Concurrently, Joe Biden stated that he intends to continue focusing on reviewing requests for leniency in the coming weeks.
Priorly, Joe Biden granted clemency to his son Hunter, who was adjudicated guilty of illegally obtaining firearms and entered a guilty plea in a tax evasion matter. The president did not dispute Hunter’s actions but deemed the prosecution of his son «unfair» and motivated by political purposes, given that individuals committing similar actions, in his view, generally do not incur criminal charges. to criminal liability and imprison a number of political figures, including Joe Biden himself along with his family and the Vice President of the United States, and Trump’s main election rival Kamala Harris, and law enforcement officers who were investigating crimes committed by Trump himself, and even his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who testified against him at trial and expressed fears that, having come to power, Trump will have the opportunity to launch a large-scale campaign of revenge against his political opponents.
Against this backdrop, as indicated by AP, various human rights organizations are urging Biden to exercise his authority to pardon as many convicts as feasible, particularly those under a death sentence, given its active utilization during Trump’s initial tenure: more individuals were executed under him than under any other president within the previous 130 years. Additionally, according to AP sources, Biden is considering the prospect of affording immunity from prosecution to officials who probed criminal allegations against Trump, yet the president is apprehensive that this might establish an undesirable precedent.