\n\n“When Joe Biden took office, he inherited the largest backlog of unresolved clemency cases in U.S. history: 14,000 people waiting to find out if their convictions would be erased or sentences reduced, or if they\u2019d get any answer at all.”
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“In most cases, Trump bypassed the lengthy, multilevel process for clemency that has been conducted for more than a century. Instead, he made decisions through an ad hoc system where politically connected allies and well-paid lobbyists tried to persuade him in person and on TV to use pardons to help friends and hurt enemies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In total, Trump granted 237 pardons or commutations and denied 180 cases. Many of those he acted on were headline-grabbing<\/a>: former members of Congress, numerous people convicted in Robert Mueller\u2019s probe into Russia\u2019s 2016 election interference, and security contractors convicted for massacring Iraqi civilians in 2008. He failed to act on thousands of other cases, leaving 13,750 behind for Biden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the current backlog \u2014 the largest on record<\/a>, according to the Justice Department and experts \u2014 can\u2019t be blamed on Trump alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Barack Obama waited well into his second term to act. When he urged federal prisoners to apply for leniency under his clemency initiative, which allowed certain inmates to make their case for getting their sentences commuted, petitions soared. He received more than 36,000 requests, the largest total of any president on record. And he acted on an historic amount \u2014 more than 22,000 cases \u2014 granting clemency 1,927 times, including 212 pardons and 1,715 commutations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Obama didn\u2019t take care of all the pending cases, leaving behind 13,000 of them when he left office. And when his final pardon attorney, Deborah Leff, resigned in January of Obama\u2019s final year in office<\/a>, she lamented that the clemency initiative didn\u2019t have enough resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn his clemency initiative, President Obama focused significant resources on identifying inmates, most of them people of color, who had been sentenced to excessive and draconian sentences,\u201d said Neil Eggleston, who served as White House counsel for Obama. \u201cThe president would have liked to clear the backlog in pending petitions, but resources spent in achieving that goal would have resulted in fewer inmates who were serving those excessive sentences for relatively minor drug crimes being released.\u201d”<\/p>\n\n\n\n