President Biden on Friday commuted the sentences of nearly 2,500 inmates serving long prison terms for nonviolent drug offenses, the broadest commutation of individual sentences ever issued by an American president.
The commutations are for offenders who received harsher sentences for drug crimes than they would under current practices, a move aimed at reversing longstanding criminal justice disparities, Mr. Biden said.
“This action is an important step toward righting historic wrongs, correcting sentencing disparities and providing deserving individuals the opportunity to return to their families and communities after spending far too much time behind bars,” Mr. Biden said in a statement.
The commutations add to Mr. Biden’s sweeping use of his clemency powers as he prepares to leave office. In recent weeks, he has also commuted the sentences of nearly all prisoners on federal death row and set what was a single-day record of 1,500 commutations for those moved to home confinement during the pandemic.
The latest action represents a full circle moment for Mr. Biden, who as a senator championed legislation that criminal justice experts say helped create sentencing disparities and fuel the mass incarceration he now appears focused on addressing during his final days in office.
Inimai Chettiar, the former deputy executive director of the Justice Action Network, a bipartisan group that pushes for changes to the criminal justice system, said Mr. Biden’s clemency action was “one of the bigger things he’s done on criminal justice reform.”
“He was intimately involved in creating many of the different laws that led to mass incarceration, including those that created the crack cocaine disparity, and this is a moment where he is showing a marked change in his criminal justice vision,” she said.
As a senator, Mr. Biden worked on the 1986 legislation that imposed those sentencing disparities and the 1994 crime bill, which he for years defended. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Mr. Biden expressed regret for his support of the legislation, and he committed to addressing the long drug sentences that resulted.
Janai Nelson, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said the commutations had “helped to level the egregious disparity in crack cocaine sentences for nonviolent offenders from the infamous war on drugs,” which she said “led to the gross disproportionate incarceration of Black people.”
“I believe that the arc of President Biden’s own evolution on the criminal legal system is a testament to the power of strategic advocacy, of public pressure, of patience and faith that nothing and no one is irredeemable,” Ms. Nelson said.
Mr. Biden said he would consider additional commutations, which leave the guilty verdict intact but reduce some or all of the punishment, as well as pardons, which wipe out convictions, in the coming days. Mr. Biden has been considering pre-emptive pardons for a number of former elected officials and other people his successor, President-elect Donald J. Trump, may target for political retribution.
Mr. Biden said his latest commutations would help those who received sentences for crimes associated with crack cocaine who would most likely have been released had the substance instead been powder cocaine, or who faced inflated charges for drug crimes.
Mr. Biden said in his statement that he was following the lead of Congress, which over the past two decades has passed legislation to remedy decades-long disparities spurred by tough-on-crime laws, such as mandatory minimum sentences.
“As Congress recognized through the Fair Sentencing Act and the First Step Act, it is time that we equalize these sentencing disparities,” Mr. Biden said.
The move comes after Mr. Biden faced mounting pressure from advocates and Democratic allies to use his clemency powers in his final days in office to release inmates who are vulnerable or suffered from systemic inequities.
Those calls grew louder last month after Mr. Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon of his son Hunter — after repeatedly insisting he would not do so — erasing years of legal troubles, including a federal conviction for illegally buying a gun and a guilty plea to tax evasion charges.
Democrats and criminal justice advocates have called on him to specifically focus on those who have been imprisoned for decades for drug laws that have changed over time.
Some of Mr. Biden’s closest allies, such as Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, have made the case that crack cocaine was more widespread among the Black community, while powder cocaine tended to be used by white people.
Mr. Biden had already issued blanket pardons, including for thousands of people convicted of federal possession of marijuana and veterans convicted of engaging in gay sex. None of those people were in prison at the time.
Some Democrats lobbying the White House said that using clemency to address the sentencing disparities could be a cornerstone of the president’s criminal justice record.
“This is what we’ve been calling for, and this is the type of leadership the moment demands,” Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts said in response to Mr. Biden’s announcement. “This will be a defining part of President Biden’s legacy.”
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