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When Charles Turner heard that President Joe Biden had pardoned his son Hunter this week it left him feeling hopeful.
After 36 years in federal prison, Turner was released in May 2020. Now 60, Turner has always maintained his innocence in the crime he and seven co-defendants were convicted of — a 1984 rape and murder in Washington, D.C. There was no physical evidence tying the men to the crime, and the investigation was marred by coerced testimony and the prosecution’s failure to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence, as detailed in a popular podcast series called “The Alley: DC’s 8th and H Case.”
Turner and his co-defendants have exhausted all of their appeals, and are focused on one slim avenue that remains for them to receive a formal measure of recognition as they see it: a presidential pardon. Unlike most people convicted of crimes, those in the nation’s capital can’t appeal to a state’s governor for clemency — only the president can provide it. That’s why Biden’s announcement felt hopeful for Turner, who told me about the emotional toll of having a gruesome crime on his record and how the conviction affected his ability to find work.
He’s so optimistic, he speaks as though it’s just a matter of time. “It will be like an anvil lifted off my chest,” Turner said earlier this week.
Biden’s pardon of his son sparked a flood of political and ethical analysis with a wide spectrum of conclusions. Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called it a “consummate act of nepotism” that has “stained the record of the Biden presidency.” Writing for Slate, Mark Joseph Stern called the pardon “at once defensible and perversely selfish.” But while Toobin and Stern may disagree on just how out-of-bounds Biden’s decision was, they agree that there are many others affected by the criminal justice system who don’t have the last name Biden, and who are worthy of clemency consideration.
People with innocence claims like Turner aren’t the only ones to derive hope from Biden’s move.
Forbes contributor Walter Pavlo argues that whatever one makes of Biden’s pardon, or President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to wield clemency power to free people convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, it’s a good thing that presidents are talking about clemency power. That prerogative is virtually limitless when it comes to federal crimes: Presidents can pardon (forgive a conviction) and offer commutations (shorten sentences). While pardons do not erase a person’s criminal record, they do appear on that record alongside the conviction.
Pavlo argues that the roughly 1,500 federal prisoners who were released under the 2020 pandemic relief CARES Act and remain on house arrest should be in line for immediate consideration. The program largely released older prisoners who had served most of their sentences and were not deemed a public safety risk. More than 36,000 people were released, the vast majority of whom have now completed their sentences.
Those with remaining time face an uncertain future. The first Trump administration said that when the pandemic emergency was over, they would have to return to prison — a decision that Biden reversed. The incoming Trump administration could undo Biden’s action. The Biden administration has previously indicated that it would be amenable to granting clemency for CARES recipients, encouraging them to submit applications in 2021.
Advocates for incarcerated women and girls have proposed that Biden focus clemency on people convicted of crimes that stem from fighting back against abusers. If the administration did pursue clemency in this vein, it wouldn’t be without precedent. In 2022, Biden pardoned Beverly Ann Ibn-Tamas, who shot and killed her husband during a heated argument in 1976. Ibn-Tamas alleged that her husband was physically and emotionally abusive and had threatened her, but some testimony related to that alleged abuse was not allowed during trial. Earlier this year, my colleague Cary Aspinwall reported that there has been an increasing willingness to reconsider sentences for domestic abuse survivors, as part of a broader recognition that traditional self-defense laws were written primarily with men in mind.
The Biden administration also has history issuing clemency for people convicted of marijuana offenses. In 2022, Biden issued a blanket pardon for those convicted of simple possession that affected roughly 6,500 people — though no one actually got out of prison because of it. Jason Ortiz of the progressive drug policy nonprofit Last Prisoner Project told Democracy Now that Biden should “extend the same grace and compassion” he showed his son to the more than 3,000 federal prisoners incarcerated on marijuana trafficking charges, in addition to the existing pardons for possession.
Relatedly, after the 2024 election, a group of Democratic lawmakers appealed to Biden to commute the sentences of people facing long terms for some other drug crimes. While the 2018 First Step Act reduced some mandatory long sentences, it was not retroactive and did not apply to people sent to prison before its passage. Biden could elect to commute those sentences down to match the current law.
The sentencing advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums is also pushing for commutations for elderly and infirm “old law” prisoners, who are not eligible for compassionate release due to another quirk in the First Step Act.
Finally, there’s the possibility of commutations for prisoners on federal death row. Biden ran on a promise to end the federal use of the death penalty. While there have been no federal executions during Biden’s time in office, the incoming Trump administration could pick up where it left off in 2020, executing people at a rate not seen in generations — something we covered in a November edition of this newsletter.
It’s not yet clear which of these commutation possibilities Biden and his advisers might find compelling, but White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters this week that “you could expect more” pardons and clemency action as the president’s term draws to a close. To date, Biden has issued clemency at a historically low clip. On Friday it was reported that he is considering preemptive pardons for some political figures who could face retribution under a second Trump administration.
Jean-Pierre added that Biden takes the responsibility of ensuring fairness in the criminal justice system “very seriously.”
