• 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.