• Yawweee877h444@lemmy.worldOP
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    9 days ago

    This is enraging. Makes my blood boil.

    I’m not seeing anyone reporting on an actual reason biden would do this. If anyone has any source on that I’d like to see it. What the fuck could his justification be? If anything, the judges deserved much harsher sentences, not a fucking pardon.

    Insanity. If not, please enlighten me.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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      9 days ago

      https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/13/biden-clemency-judge-michael-conahan-000890

      Those commutations were extended to people on Covid-related home confinement after federal authorities verified that their offenses were nonviolent and not a sex offense or terrorism related, the official said. They were also all considered a low risk for recidivism, had not engaged in any violent or gang-related activity while in prison and had been on good behavior for at least a year. None of the commutations granted were individual decisions, the official added, and none who met the criteria were excluded.

      Not that any of that makes it any better. Some people are in prison for a reason. Blindly letting a bunch of them out, after getting blowback because you wrote a get out of jail free card for your particular family, is just as bad as blindly treating them all as animals “without considering the specifics of his case.”

      • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        Yeah, I hate Joe Biden as much as anyone who knows his history on criminal justice issues should, but his mistake here was one of negligence.

        The real problem here is

        federal authorities verified that their offenses were nonviolent

        Like, how was this nonviolent? This judge participated in a scheme to kidnap children and if they or their parents resisted they’d have violence inflicted upon them, just because that violence was being done by police officers and the kidnapping was to a jail cell instead of a brothel shouldn’t change anything, but the system can’t help but give a judge the easy white collar criminal treatment

      • ArtieShaw@fedia.io
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        9 days ago

        This is where it gets messy for me.

        I’m in favor of letting the COVID release prisoners go. It seems unnaturally cruel to send non-violent offenders back to prison for the rest of their sentence if they haven’t reoffended.

        I would not have released this guy in the first place. “Non-violent” my ass.

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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          9 days ago

          I think the Biden administration is probably pretty unanimous in connecting “has money and good connections” with “how much harm could he be doing, really when you get down to it?” They probably didn’t even realize that there might be bad people in the mixture of “non-violent” offenders, such that they would need to look over the list with any amount of attention.

          It just happened that this guy is so infamous that you can make a news story about it, but I would bet that there are some quiet sociopaths in the mixture who didn’t make the news who are even more horrible.

    • cogitase@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 days ago

      He has been on house arrest since 2020 after 9 years in prison and only had 2 years of house arrest left. His sentence was commuted but he wasn’t part of the pardons, so there’s no change to his status as a felon. All this means is they are removing his ankle monitor less than 2 years earlier than scheduled.

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      You see, when you are rich you are living the good life. So as a judge would say: Apart from abusing a trusted position, and being wealthy and having privileges far above the norm, so he didn’t need corruption top live a more than decent life. But apart from that, and being corrupt despite that. He lived an otherwise good life!!

      Yes people have freaking gotten off on such nonsense!!! Except the parts that expose the double standard of course.
      These assholes believe that being privileged means they actually deserve MORE privileges. When they should be punished HARDER!. A homeless person struggling to survive, can get years in prison for stealing a snack bar! No mercy for the poor! He can’t even afford a decent lawyer, so we can discard him as we please, and not get in trouble for it.

      The system is so badly tilted to favor the privileged with more privileges in all aspects of life.

    • CitricBase@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      This has to have been some kind of clerical error, there’s no political motivation whatsoever for Biden to have done this.

      That being the case, keep publicizing the story, and maybe it will get to the administrations radar. Have the clemencies already been actuated, or is there still time to correct the mistake?