Hunter was granted a pardon. Victims of the war on drugs? – Mother Jones

President Joe Biden walking with his son Hunter in July 2024.Susan Walsh/AP

On Sunday, less than two months into his presidency, President Biden granted a full and unconditional pardon to his son Hunter, convicted in June on three criminal charges linked to federal gun crimes and three tax crimes in September. Reactions were mixed: many criticized Biden, who maintains that her son’s beliefs were politically motivated, for setting a bad precedent and breaking his promise not to intervene. Others, even some who are not fans of the president – ​​said they sympathized with his decision to pardon his son.

The controversial decision came after Biden repeatedly pledged not to use his presidential powers to interfere in his son’s case — and after months in which Democrats on Capitol Hill, along with their defenders, urged Biden to use his pardon power more broadly to free people incarcerated by federal drug policies that unfairly target Black and brown people. Hunter Biden won’t spend a day in a jail cell for his crimes; the same cannot be said for the tens of thousands of people serving time in federal prison due to disproportionate convictions and sentences in the blatantly racist war on drugs. Biden can still pardon many of them or commute their sentences – and set another, more valuable precedent.

Advocacy groups praised Biden for some drug-related pardons, such as his decision in April to pardon 11 people and commute five sentences that the ACLU called unfairly long. Biden too granted pardons in October 2022 for anyone convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law — but, as advocates pointed out, that pardon didn’t actually free anyone who was in prison.

In October, Senator Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia) and seven Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Biden urging him to commute sentences that exceeded those set by the First Step Act of 2018, a Trump-era criminal justice reform bill that reduced minimum sentences. The Senate letter suggested that thousands of people would be freed as a result of the action and called on the Biden administration to provide categorical relief to those who faced harsher penalties for crack cocaine than for its powder form. (The White House did not respond to questions about whether Biden would commute these sentences.)

In 1986, the anti-drug law – authored by then-Senator Joe Biden – set a one-hundred-to-one ratio between quantities of powder and crack cocaine, triggering a five-year mandatory minimum sentence. A 2010 reform made it still a disproportionate rate of eighteen to one. This gap has disproportionately affected the Black community: in fiscal year 2021, nearly four in five people convicted of crack cocaine trafficking were Black, compared to 25 percent for powder cocaine. Drug Policy Action, a nonpartisan advocacy group, recently called on Biden to commute extended sentences because of the disparity.

In 2022, the Biden Justice Department announced that it would no longer differentiate between powder and crack cocaine in prosecutions, a disparity that it said had “no scientific basis, furthered no objective of d law enforcement and resulted in unjustified racial disparities in our criminal justice system. » Advocates welcomed the decision but stressed that it was temporary and only applied to new cases.

The Last Prisoner Project, a nonprofit working to free all marijuana prisoners nationwide, joined members of Congress in November on the steps of the Capitol to call on Biden to “rectify the unjust and unnecessary criminal laws passed by Congress and draconian sentences handed down by judges.” as he wrote in a covering letter advocating pardons for federal marijuana convictions.

As Sarah Gersten, executive director of the group, points out, has Marijuana momentBiden’s justification for pardoning her son was that the justice system had reached an unjust outcome — which, she said, “is certainly the case for the nearly 3,000 cannabis prisoners who remain federally incarcerated for a long time.” largely legalized activity.