These commutations are terrible. They apparently applied to any person who had been released to home confinement during the pandemic, with no consideration given to individual cases. Not only Mark Ciavarella, who literally sold kids to for-profit prisons, but also Rita Crundwell who embezzled $54 million from a small Illinois town.
I also would have little problem with commuting sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, but these and other cases where the individual caused real harm to people – even if not direct acts of violence – should have been left off the list.
He wasn’t pardoned - he had his sentence commuted (as did Michael Conahan). But this makes them both free man - a sickening development. I guess what they did (to ~2300 kids) is technically a non-violent crime (as Biden said), but it was evil almost beyond belief.
That any plan for either of these scumbags short of dipping them in hot maple syrup and then tying them to a large anthill could have got past the gag reflex of anyone in the White House is astonishing.
I think that is needed regardless because the Pam Bondi Justice Department is liable to ignore, or otherwise challenge, preemptive pardons.
Someone told me here that Trump will stop that because he wants to give himself a preemptive pardon. But he’ll figure that the GOP will win in November 2028, and, if not, JD Vance is going to do the right (as in far-right) thing on January 6, 2029.
If Trump has to choose between slightly increasing his own long-term risk, and getting revenge, he will will go with vengeance – I say with low confidence.
I stand corrected. Who in the world thought these blanket commutations were a good idea? Literally, thousands of kids were victimized. Shame on Biden and his advisors.
Yes to both (that a fund is needed whether or not Biden issues pre-emptive pardons, and that Trump will value vengeance over a possible need to preserve a pre-emptive pardon power for himself).
I do disagree with your underlying premise that Trump will be meekly leaving office in 2028. I don’t think it matters whether or not Vance has a chance of winning, that year. If Trump is still alive, he’s not going to leave—‘the American people will demand’ that he remain in office.
Not really, of course, but that’s what he’ll claim. (Off-topic, I realize.)
I’m not sure this is the right thread. If there’s a better thread, will a mod please move it there?
As you can see in the preview, President Biden commuted the sentences to life in prison for 37 of the 40 inmates on federal death row.
He did not commute the sentences for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers; White nationalist Dylan Roof, who shot up a Black church and killed nine people; and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in a synagogue. Personally, I think we should abolish capita punishment. But we have it. The crimes of these people were egregious, and high-profile. I understand why their sentences were not commuted.
But it seems to leave Trump with a problem. He has vowed to go on a killing spree when he’s back in office. Tsarnaev has a foreign name. I doubt he’ll get any sympathy. But Roof is a White kid who killed Black people. How do the MAGA crowd see him? And Bowers killed not-Christians. How do they see him? If Trump orders them to be killed, how would that play with his base?
That’s exactly what I thought. I’d say this is epic-level trolling by Biden, except I don’t think he’d actually take the death sentence so lightly. But yeah, Trump is going to get some execution blue balls over this.
I don’t think the President CAN “order them to be killed”. He has the power to commute death sentences, or to order stays. I don’t think he can do anything to hurry them.
I think you were taking the statement a little too literally. But he can ‘suggest’ that the sentences be carried out expeditiously. But I think such encouragement might only be for Tsarnaev, and that he’ll commute the sentences of the other two.
These are all relatively recent crimes, so they may not be at that stage yet, but there does come a point where the appeals are over and whether the execution is scheduled is a political decision at the top. It’s not an automatic or independent thing.
And let’s remember Trump did schedule a lot of executions the first time around:
To put it in perspective, only three people had been executed by the federal government in the past 50 years. Meanwhile, in less than five months, eight people have already been put to death by Trump’s Justice Department, with five more executions scheduled to happen before Trump leaves office.
Don’t fool yourself. It’s entirely fashionable for racists to try and prove they’re “totally not a racist” by throwing the very people they have radicalized through stochastic terrorism under the bus. It’s how they maintain (increasingly less, but still vaguely, to their followers) plausible deniability over their racism. Trump will eat up the opportunity to prove up his “totally not a racist” creds by executing what amounts to poor white trash in his mind, same as he’s got no problem proving he’s a legit conservative by slashing social security and cutting taxes on the ultra wealthy, never mind if it hurts the very same people who turned out to elect him (see also the Leopards Eating Faces thread in the Pit).
My prediction is that he’ll gleefully stick a needle in Roof’s arm just as soon as the courts are done with him. Then all his followers will crow about how this proves that he’s “totally not a racist” and thus by extension neither are they for voting for him.
Michael Conahan has already served 14 years out of a 17 year sentence. And his crime, though egregious, required him to be a position of power. I don’t think he’ll be in a position to wrongfully send children to private prisons again.
What does that have to do with anything? Is that supposed to be a mitigating factor? It should be just the opposite. A conviction with no prison time at all would have served the same purpose. He already got a good plea deal, getting much less time than his fellow corrupt judge. Punishment isn’t meant to just deter the convicted from re-offending but also future potential offenders.
From the standpoint of deterrence: It’s hard for me to imagine someone being completely undeterred by 14 years in prison, but when they hear it’s 17 years a light bulb clicks in their mind and they decide not to commit the crime they were thinking about.
Biden went and pardoned all members of the Jan 6 committee, Milley, Fauci and possibly some others with an explicit note that pardoning them is no indication that they are guilty of anything. I can’t be mad about it.