Having Pardoned His Son, Biden Faces Pressure to Enact Mass Clemency

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The Road to Abolition

As the media drag out the political drama over President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter Biden, one of the right-wing media’s favorite boogeymen, thousands of families ripped apart by the U.S.’s giant system of mass incarceration are also asking for relief.

Despite howls from frustrated fellow Democrats, Biden said he reneged on his pledge not to pardon Hunter because, as a father, he could not allow his son’s future to be compromised by a politically motivated prosecution. Now advocates are asking Biden to show the same level of compassion for the 10,000 people who have sent clemency petitions to his desk and the 40 people facing execution on death row.

Presidential clemency powers generally allow Biden to commute sentences and reduce a petitioner’s time in prison or save them from execution, while a presidential pardon prevents punishment for federal criminal charges now and in the future. When Biden performed the traditional pardoning of Thanksgiving turkeys last week, death penalty opponents pointed out that the president has yet to save a single human being from execution.

“The truth is the people that the president can help right now do not have him as a father, but he could protect a lot of other families,” said DaMareo Cooper, co-executive director of Popular Democracy, in an interview.

Biden points to Hunter’s recovery from addiction to argue that his son deserves another chance. DaMareo said thousands of other families feel the same way about their loved ones serving long sentences in federal prison for drug-related crimes or marred by a criminal record. Many are Black and Latino families, DaMareo said, and when you add everyone together, the number of people Biden can help right now is many times higher than 10,000.

“This could be his one standup moment,” DaMareo said.

In addition to pardoning turkeys, presidents often pardon famous people with political connections during their final weeks in office. At the end of his first term, President-elect Donald Trump controversially pardoned celebrities, political allies and family members who were facing federal criminal charges or seemed at risk of doing so in the future.

So far, Biden has issued pardons at a lower rate than both Trump and Barack Obama, but the White House has suggested that more pardons are on the way. Obama signed off on 1,927 clemency petitions compared to Trump’s 238, according to the Justice Department.

So far, Biden has issued pardons at a lower rate than both Trump and Barack Obama, but the White House has suggested that more pardons are on the way.

In a letter to the White House, an alliance of grassroots racial justice and public safety groups has argued that President Biden has a moral obligation to go much further than previous presidents. The groups are calling on Biden to establish an independent clemency review board to examine all 10,000 clemency petitions on his desk.

As a senator, Biden championed harsh anti-drug laws in the 1980s and wrote the omnibus 1994 crime bill that passed during the racist hysteria over crack cocaine and other drugs. The 1994 crime bill has a complicated legacy on its own, but taken together, this suite of federal legislation contributed to the acceleration of mass incarceration in the United States, which has imprisoned more of its population than any other nation since 2002.

“As the lead author of the 1994 Crime Bill and a major supporter of a number of bills in the 1980s, all of which have severely harmed Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poorly resourced communities around the country for a generation, you have a moral and social obligation to repair these harms inflicted on our communities,” the letter to Biden reads.

DaMareo remembers growing up in a Black community that was heavily policed for crack cocaine at the time. Young people disappeared into the prison system for years. His teenage cousins were labeled “superpredators,” a media myth based on extremely racist tropes that significantly harmed an entire generation of Black youth. Corporate media and politicians spread anti-Black myths about “crack babies” and “welfare queens” that have been resoundingly debunked.

In the 1980s and 1990s, DaMareo said, police and policy makers saw Black and Latino people who used crack as “human trash” — both criminal and disposable. Today the most stigmatized drugs on the street are synthetics such as fentanyl that reach far beyond urban markets, and white users have disproportionately benefited from policies that treat addiction more like a medical issue rather than a crime.

Ahead of his presidential run in 2019, Biden apologized to the civil rights community for his tough-on-crime stances during the 1980s and 1990s. The anti-drug laws of the time mandated tougher sentences for crack cocaine than powder cocaine, creating massive racial disparities in sentencing. Biden admitted it was the wrong approach.

“Our president now knows more about addiction and substance abuse and how that leads to criminal activity,” DaMareo said. “He knows more because we all know more now, and we are saying, you know better so do better.”

Neil Berry, a community advocate with VOCAL-NY, became an activist after he was wrongfully convicted of a crime in 1988 and served eight years in a New York state prison. Berry, who is Black, met other men in prison who were convicted of crimes they did not commit and fought their cases until all legal options ran out.

“I was locked up with guys who had wrongful convictions, and they had been in there 20 or 30 years,” Berry said in an interview. “There was no pathway to exoneration, and some of them are still in there.”

Berry was incarcerated at the height of the “war on drugs” and described meeting people who were serving 20 to 30 years for selling marijuana, for example. Others are still serving long sentences into old age despite finding “redemption and rehabilitation” through community organizing both inside and outside of prison.

Berry is now the champion of the Challenging Wrongful Convictions Act in New York, a bill that would establish a right to counsel for wrongful conviction claims and allow defendants to bring new evidence — including DNA evidence — to court post-conviction. Currently, state law makes it nearly impossible to challenge a wrongful conviction, Berry said, so the bill aims to change that.

“As the lead author of the 1994 Crime Bill, you have a moral and social obligation to repair these harms inflicted on our communities,” the letter to Biden reads.

The bill was passed by the state legislature and must be signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, by the end of the year to become law.

Even if Hochul signs the bill, innocent prisoners will still have to fight for their freedom in court. Berry said the clearest path to exoneration will always be clemency granted by a governor or president with a pardon or commuted sentence. Berry called on Biden to extend the same compassion he has for Hunter to other families.

“He pardoned his own son, I can see the love there, but that is like a slap in the face for so many people who are fighting through the court system,” Berry said. “There are so many people who are so deserving.”