Love this idea - if I were to extend it, I'd add some kind of analysis breaking down the % composition of pardons (fraud vs drug offences vs financial crime) by President to see if there's some common trend. I was a little surprised to see the Obama number quite so high, until it became apparent that the vast majority were drug offenders being pardoned
The Obama number is also high because the designer combined Obama's first and second terms into one figure, unlike what he did with the other presidents who served two terms.
Stuff like this is very common. For example, at the start of Trump's second term, the whitehouse history page was changed to make democrat presidents look bad -
clinton-1 and clinton-2 are distinct. I think it's more likely collected differently. The people gathering data will change. Someone with different data standards worked there for a while.
Indeed. It took me a bit to remember why. There was a clemency program for nonviolent drug offenders with otherwise clean records who had served at least 10 years in federal prison under out of date sentencing guidelines.
A bunch of mass commutations have occurred under Obama, Biden, and most recently under Trump, I'm working on a comparison tool, so we can visualize the change in number of pardons by president, further breakdown of composition is an interesting idea as well.
A more interesting analysis to me would not be the number pardoned, but rather the monetary value of correlated donations or direct financial interests. Pardons are one of the many services for sale, it seems.
I'm pretty sure the numbers are going up simply because 1) 90s sentencing laws got insanely strict and prisons are full of old guys serving inflated sentences, 2) drug laws eventually became more lax and people are in prison for things that aren't even criminal any more, and 3) prisons have simply run out of space and it's easier to release people than build more.
This kind of topic is bound to bring up a lot of outrage, but I'd invite people to remember it's the Marc Richs of the old buying pardons that you should be directing that toward. There are plenty of people locked up for a very long time who really don't deserve it. I recall a Chumash woman I worked with at the LA County Museum of Natural History 24 years ago. I gave her a ride home a few times and eventually realized I was taking her to a halfway house, and it came out that the FBI has busted her in the early 90s for criminal conspiracy and her only actual offense was refusing to testify against her husband, who'd been selling marijuana on their reservation under the logic that he didn't believe US law should apply because of the historical treaties about tribal land. She did 10 years in federal prison for that.
Be that as it may, the jurisdiction I am living in has an explicit right to refuse to testify against a spouse. It is wild to me that one can construct a crime out of that, let alone one that warrants a decade of incarceration.
Sounds completely plausible to me. Lots of people who sold marijuana in the 90s had some kind of principled objection to the laws making it illegal to do so.
@nonameiguess I agree on the pardon buying, the reason why I started looking into building this was because of a video by Liz Oyer, who pointed out all the restitution and fines that were being forgiven under Trump.
That's kind of how I came upon the name for the site, I wanted to see if there is any truth to the rumors that people are selling and buying pardons. In order to investigate that, we needed a set of data to start from, in a manner that was easily queryable as opposed to what's on the DOJ website.
