This morning, President Biden announced that he will commute the sentences of nearly 2,500 inmates serving long prison terms for nonviolent drug offenses. The commutations are for offenders who received harsher sentences for drug crimes than they would have under current law and practice. Over the past two decades, Congress has passed legislation to rectify sentencing disparities and practices that disproportionately affected Black people and fueled mass incarceration, such as the now-discredited distinction between crack and powder cocaine. In his statement, Biden said “as Congress recognized through the Fair Sentencing Act and the First Step Act, it is time we equalize these sentencing disparities.” The commutations are the latest use of clemency power by President Biden, following the full pardon of his son Hunter, commuting the sentences of nearly all federal death row prisoners, and commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 individuals moved to home confinement during the pandemic. Read on for more criminal law news.
Final report (half) released. In what appear to be the closing moments of the federal criminal prosecutions of President-Elect Donald Trump, the Justice Department delivered half of special counsel Jack Smith’s final report to Congress early Tuesday morning. Smith completed his report of the election-interference and mishandling-of-classified-documents cases before resigning from his position last Friday. The Justice Department has held off on releasing the half of the report pertaining to the classified-documents case until legal proceedings against two co-defendants are resolved. In the half-report that was released, pertaining to the election-interference case, Smith wrote that the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Trump, but that the prosecutors were compelled to drop the cases due to binding Justice Department policy prohibiting criminal cases from moving forward against sitting presidents.
