US President Joe Biden announced this Thursday that he will commute the sentences of some 1,500 people and pardon another 39 convicted of non-violent crimes in what is the largest clemency measure approved in the history of the country, according to the White House.
Biden “will grant clemency to nearly 1,500 Americans, the largest number in a single day, who have demonstrated successful rehabilitation and a strong commitment to making their communities safer,” the White House announced in a statement.
The president commutes the sentences of nearly 1,500 people who were placed under house arrest during the Covid-19 pandemic and who have successfully reintegrated into their families and communities.
It also pardons 39 people who were convicted of non-violent crimes in an action that is the largest grant of clemency in a single day in modern history, the White House stressed.
Pardoned for those convicted of non-violent crimes
Those pardoned are generally people who were convicted of crimes nonviolent, some drug-related, when they were young, and since then they have completed studies, held steady jobs and engaged in charitable work, according to a list of brief biographies from the Justice Department.
The note specifies that Biden has issued more sentence commutations at this point in his presidency, which he will leave on January 20, than any of his recent predecessors. at the very moment of his first mandates.
And he also announces that in the coming weeks he will take steps to “provide meaningful second chances and will continue to review additional pardons and commutations.”
The decision comes just ten days after the US president granted a controversial “total and unconditional” pardon to his son Hunter Biden, who was prosecuted for illegal possession of a weapon and tax fraud, a measure highly criticized in the country. especially by the Republican Party and even by some of his Democratic colleagues.
The decision exempted Hunter Biden from a possible prison sentence for having lied in the criminal record when he acquired a revolver in October 2018 and then had it for 11 days without acknowledging his then drug addiction, and also freed him from the nine charges of tax fraud that were brought against him and of which he had already pleaded guilty.
On his last day in office, President Barack Obama had set a new record for clemency by commuting the sentences of 330 prisoners convicted of nonviolent drug crimes.
In total, Obama, also a Democrat, commuted the sentences of 1,715 people, including 568 who had been sentenced to life imprisonment.
