While Hunter Biden will not spend a day inside a prison cell for his offenses; the same can’t be said for tens of thousands of people serving federal prison time because of disproportionate conviction and sentencing in the war on drugs. President Biden still could pardon many of them, or commute their sentences, and set another, precedent. Advocacy groups have praised Biden for some drug-related clemencies, like his move in April to pardon 11 people and commute five sentences the American Civil Liberties Union called unjustly long. Biden also issued pardons in October 2022 for everyone convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law—but, as advocates pointed out, that pardon didn’t free anyone who was in prison, reports Mother Jones. In October, Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and seven Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee urged Biden to commute sentences that exceeded those set by 2018’s First Step Act, a Trump-era criminal justice reform bill that reduced minimum sentences.
The Senate letter suggested that thousands would be freed by the action, and called on Biden to grant categorical relief to those who faced harsher sentencing for crack cocaine than they would have for its powder form. In 1986, the Anti–Drug Abuse Act—drafted by then Sen. Joe Biden—set a hundred-to-one ratio between the amounts of powder and crack cocaine that triggered a mandatory five-year minimum sentence. A 2010 reform made it a still-disproportionate eighteen-to-one. The discrepancy has disproportionately affected Black defendants. In fiscal 2021, almost four in five people convicted of trafficking crack cocaine were Black, compared to 25 percent for powder cocaine. Drug Policy Action, an advocacy group, has asked Biden to commute sentences lengthened by the disparity. In 2022, the Justice Department announced that it would no longer differentiate between powder and crack cocaine when seeking charges, a disparity it said had “no basis in science, furthers no law enforcement purposes, and drives unwarranted racial disparities in our criminal justice system.” Advocates praised the move but noted that it was temporary, and only applied to new cases. The Last Prisoner Project, a nonprofit seeking to release all marijuana prisoners, joined members of Congress in November to ask Biden to “rectify unjust and unnecessary criminal laws passed by Congress and draconian sentences given by judges.,” The group's Sarah Gersten said Biden’s justification for pardoning his son was that the justice system reached an unjust outcome—which, she says is the case "for the nearly 3,000 cannabis prisoners who remain incarcerated federally for activity that has been widely legalized.”
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