The United States pardon system has been developing a bad name in recent months. It is an area where Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Constitution gives the president essentially boundless authority: “The President shall … have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” Normally, though, aware of the controversial nature of unilaterally declaring that someone facing criminal charges should be freed, the president exercises this authority in the waning days of a term – there are 10 weeks after a November presidential election and the new president’s inauguration in January, when the incumbent has either been voted out, or is headed into retirement. Either way, there are no re-election concerns. This is significant because victims are often upset when a lengthy legal process is erased by a stroke of the White House pen.
President Joe Biden followed this pattern, issuing more commutations in his final days than any other chief executive in history. Consistent with his Catholic faith, he almost cleared federal death row, commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 condemned prisoners. But he courted the most dissent when he annulled the convictions of his son Hunter, before preemptively pardoning other family members for imagined offences for which they would likely never have faced trial. It was all tinged with nepotism, using his constitutional power for those close to him.
On his heels came President Donald Trump. As with so many of his actions in his first 100 days, Trump was acting as if he were already running out of time. He had barely taken the oath of office before he issued 1,600 pardons to those said to be guilty of insurrection in the often-violent storming of the Capitol in 2021. Sure enough, this provoked outrage among some and was characterised by the chief of the Capitol Police as a “slap in the face” to all his officers.
Trump has since continued his spate of pardons. Some are fairly predictable: 21 of his recent grants concerned the FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) Act, a law that prohibits violence, intimidation, and interference with individuals seeking or providing reproductive health services – generally, then, people picketing abortion clinics. Here, he was courting the anti-abortion rights wing of MAGA.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement that Trump is “always pleased to give well-deserving Americans a second chance, especially those who have been unfairly targeted and overly prosecuted by an unjust justice system”.
As a principle, this is fair enough, but normally there must be some evidence of remorse and rehabilitation. This week, in contrast, he pardoned Scott Jenkins, a longtime supporter and former Sheriff who had been found guilty in 2024 of accepting more than $75,000 in bribes in exchange for making several businessmen into official law enforcement agents. “Sheriff Scott Jenkins, his wife Patricia, and their family have been dragged through HELL,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social network. Yet Jenkins had merely been dragged through the US trial system, like millions of others, and he had not even turned himself in to start his sentence.
Then there was the Reality TV couple, Todd and Julie Chrisley, convicted in 2022 for defrauding banks of more than $36m by submitting false bank statements and other records. They spent their ill-gotten gains on luxury cars and travel, and it is difficult to see what they did to merit special treatment.
Which brings us to the latest case, that of Larry Hoover, the notorious founder of the Chicago Gangster Disciples, convicted of ordering the murder of a rival, along with a laundry list of other offences. Prosecutors did not even bother to bring many cases to trial. Indeed, at a hearing last year, a judge asked one of Hoover’s lawyers: “How many other murders is he responsible for?”
Trump commuted his federal sentence, which is unlikely to achieve much more than to transfer him to the less pleasant Illinois prison, where he must serve 200 years on a state murder conviction. What does this achieve, and what was the president’s motive for doing it?
One particularly odd element of these pardons is that CBS News reports that many of the beneficiaries had not even made a formal application. Trump just reached out and acted on his own. In some instances, he seems to have been relying on what he saw on television. He has said he is considering clemency for those convicted in the 2020 conspiracy to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer and overthrow the state government. “I did watch the trial,” he said. “It looked to me like somewhat of a railroad job…”
Even if it is currently sometimes corrupt, or simply arbitrary, I would not abolish the president’s prerogative of mercy. I am in favour of considering second chances in all cases, for as a society we are much too punitive. But if citizens are to maintain any sense of respect for the judicial system, there should be a degree of consistency.
Indeed, due process means that there is a process, and it should be followed. I filed a compelling 76,000 word clemency petition in the case of Aafia Siddiqui before Christmas, which Biden dismissed on January 20 without addressing any of the grounds – her innocence, the CIA’s abduction of his children, the fact that she had been tortured in US custody, and the sexual abuse she faces in prison today.
Then, this week, my octogenarian former death row client, Clarence Smith, passed away in federal prison. He had been denied compassionate release even though he was terminally ill, was again patently innocent and had proved himself to be a model prisoner: He had, in his forty-one years in the penitentiary, only been given one disciplinary punishment, for the heinous offence of making his prison bed before being told to do so.
Let us therefore keep an eye on how the president’s immense power is used (or abused), and perhaps consider imposing some rules of transparency upon him.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
