President Joe Biden walking with his son, Hunter, in July 2024.Susan Walsh/AP
On Sunday, with less than two months remaining in his presidency, President Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon to his son Hunter, convicted in June on three felony charges related to federal gun crimes and on three felony tax offenses in September. Reactions have been mixed: many have criticized Biden, who argues that his son’s convictions were politically motivated, for setting a poor precedent and breaking a promise not to intervene. Others—even some who are not fans of the president—have said that they sympathize with his decision to pardon his son.
The controversial decision came after Biden repeatedly committed to not using his presidential powers to interfere in his son’s case—and after months in which Democrats on Capitol Hill, as well as advocates, urged Biden to use his clemency power more broadly to free those incarcerated by federal drug policies that unfairly target Black and brown people. 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 starkly racist War on Drugs. Biden can still pardon many of them, or commute their sentences—and set another, more valuable 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 ACLU 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 actually free anyone who was in prison.
In October, Senator Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and seven Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Biden a letter urging him 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 the Biden Administration to grant categorical relief to those who faced harsher sentencing for crack cocaine than they would have for its powder form. (The White House did not respond to questions about whether Biden would commute such sentences.)
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 the Black community: 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, a nonpartisan advocacy group, recently called on Biden to commute sentences lengthened by the disparity.
In 2022, Biden’s 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 pointed out that it was temporary, and only applied to new cases.
The Last Prisoner Project, a nonprofit working for the release of all marijuana prisoners nationwide, joined members of Congress in November on the Capitol steps to call on Biden to “rectify unjust and unnecessary criminal laws passed by Congress and draconian sentences given by judges,” as it wrote in an accompanying letter advocating pardons for federal marijuana convictions.
As pointed out by Sarah Gersten, the group’s executive director, to Marijuana Moment, Biden’s justification for pardoning his son was that the justice system had reached an unjust outcome—which, she says, “is certainly the case for the nearly 3,000 cannabis prisoners who remain incarcerated federally for activity that has been widely legalized.”