A trend toward a less generous executive has emerged in U.S. clemency history. So far, President Biden has been no exception. Biden has utilized the unilateral clemency authority of the executive branch in mass pardons that could potentially affect thousands, Axios reports. Beyond sweeping proclamations Biden has used his pardon power more sparingly than his modern predecessors on ordinary pardon cases, according to Justice Department data. The Office of the Pardon Attorney's statistics do not record clemency granted through proclamations or executive orders. Biden used them to pardon prior federal offenses of simple marijuana possession and veterans convicted and forced out of the milit because of their gender identity or sexual orientation. Experts point to structural and political reasons for the shift toward a generally more restrained approach to clemency petitions. Throughout U.S. history, the system has become deeply entangled in bureaucratic process, leading to a backlog of ordinary petitions, said Mark Osler, a legal scholar who advocates for sentencing and clemency reform. What "Biden seems to be stuck with is a system of analysis that doesn't work and hasn't worked for his predecessors either," Osler said. He pointed to a series of seven valves of review a petition must pass through — a pipeline Osler said lengthened under the Biden administration with additional input from the Domestic Policy Council.
Frank Bowman, a legal historian who has written extensively about the pardon power, cited the "nasty politics of our era" as one driving factor. “Presidents have become hyper-cautious about making sure that they don't create the grist for the opposition mill," Bowman said. President Obama granted the most acts of clemency — 1,927 pardons and commutations combined — dating back to Harry Truman. That was just over 5% of the petitions Obama received. As of May 2024, Biden had formally granted 153 petitions for clemency — that's 1.6% percent of all requests. Biden's clemency record is likely far from closed — whether he wins the 2024 election or not. DOJ data show that every president between Ford and Trump used his clemency power during his final days in office. Obama issued 1,185 clemency actions in just over three months in 2017 before he left office. That's just over 61% of all of the petitions he approved. Presidents don't always align pardons with their departures: Reagan issued around 8% of his pardons during his final three and a half months in the White House, granting over half of his pardons and commutations in his first four years.
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