Why Did Joe Biden Grant Clemency To a Notoriously Corrupt Judge?
The story behind Biden's actions may not be what it first appears and tests our commitment to a more human criminal justice system.
Earlier this month, President Joe Biden announced around 1,500 commutations and pardons, a sweeping move that will go down in history as one of the largest single-day acts of clemency from a sitting president.
At least one of those commutations sparked controversy. Biden granted clemency to former Pennsylvania Judge Michael Conahan, who gained notoriety for being part of a corrupt scheme where he pocketed millions of dollars in exchange to sending kids to for-profit detention centers.
Sandy Fonzo, whose son was sent to a for-profit detention center by Mark Ciavarella, another judge involved in the same corrupt scheme as Conahan, appeared on Democracy Now! earlier this week to express her anguish at Biden’s actions.
“This is very emotional, very heavy, just hearing and having to relive all of this. I mean, this has just reopened wounds that have never healed,” she said. “And this is very, very difficult, very, very heavy. I shouldn’t be having to relive this, especially at Christmastime. I mean, this is just — it’s unacceptable.”
Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro similarly condemned Biden’s move.
“I do feel strongly that President Biden got it absolutely wrong and created a lot of pain here in northeastern Pennsylvania. This was not only a black eye on the community, the ‘kids for cash’ scandal, but it also affected families in really deep and profound and sad ways,” he said. “Some children took their lives because of this. Families were torn apart.”
These expressions of outrage are understandable; Conahan was involved in a scheme that stole many years of existence from children whose lives will never be the same.
But the many media headlines about Biden’s commutation in this case paint a picture of the president singling out a particularly corrupt man for a special favor.
The truth is actually a lot more complicated.
Conahan was part of a group of individuals who were put into home confinement after passage of the CARES Act during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“[It gave] the Bureau of Prison to serve nonviolent people who did not have a history of infractions, a history of violence onto home confinement as long as they had served 50% of their sentence,” explained Daniel Landsman, the vice president of policy at the criminal justice reform group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, in an interview.
At the time, this provision in the law had broad bipartisan support — both parties wanted to get people into their homes during a pandemic where overcrowded prisons could be a breeding ground for a deadly virus. Former President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice was just as enthusiastic about moving inmates to home confinement as any Democrat would have been.
Rather than go through and pick individuals who he had some kind of personal connection to (as he did with his presidential pardon for his son, Hunter) Biden turned to this list for the recent clemency action.
“What Biden did in his commutations was look at this group of people, saw that the public safety outcomes for this group of people had been positive — they had not recidivated, they had not violated their conditions,” Landsman explained.
How we think about mercy
The outrage related to Conahan’s commutation demonstrates exactly how hard it is for those in government to alter the criminal justice status quo.
Nobody who was outraged by Biden’s commutation was arguing that Conahan was at risk of re-offending or that he had in any way violated the terms of his home confinement.
Instead, what we were witnessing was outrage at the concept of mercy itself. Why does Conahan deserve it at all? He brought a mountain of suffering to the lives of countless children in exchange for personal enrichment.
But we should understand that this dilemma is not anchored to Conahan and his particular misdeeds.
The reality is that our prisons are not full of nonviolent drug offenders, the impression you may have walked away with if you got your knowledge of the system from Michelle Alexander the past few years.
Most people who are in prison have done something wrong. They’re not guilty of victimless crimes. They hurt someone. In fact, depending on how you count the numbers, most states have more violent prisoners than they do nonviolent ones.
Do they deserve mercy? Should we try to shorten their sentences or at least make their prison life more comfortable? That’s a moral and philosophical question that people will respond to in different ways.
But it’s clear that Conahan’s clemency particularly angered people on the political left, whose critique of American society tends to be that the rich and well-connected often get off scot-free while the rest of us have to play by the rules.
It’s understandable why freeing Conahan from the rest of his home confinement would aggravate this segment of the political spectrum.
But many of those same people want more mercy for prisoners who aren’t rich or well-connected but have committed serious violent crimes like assault or even murder. Do they think the victims of those prisoners are any less angry?
It’s always easy to demand mercy for people who don’t personally anger you or whose crimes didn’t personally impact you. It’s understandable why Fonzo was so outraged — it was her own child who was thrown behind bars by this corrupt scheme. But the vast majority of prisoners do have victims out there who would similarly be torn apart by seeing their victimizers shown mercy.
FAMM, Landsman’s organization, works against this dynamic every day.
“I understand folks will feel perhaps outraged or upset, and I’m not intending to minimize that. But sort of putting the outcome in the context of the greater policy here I think is important,” he said of Biden’s commutations.
It’s very hard to show mercy, particularly in American society. Our system of justice is based steeps in ideas of political
But if we want to be a more merciful society, we have to be willing to live with our anger and follow our principles anyway.
Yea, fuck that. For what he did, the judge should have died in prison.
Also, violent/non-violent is the wrong dichotomy. Serious/non-serious is a better scale.
A fist-fight between two drunks is violent but not serious.
A judge who accepts bribes to put innocent kids in prison is non-violent but serious. A serious enough violation of public trust to deserve a life sentence.
Though, I’d argue using courts to essentially kidnap a kid and put them in prison is in fact a violent crime.
While he was in federal prison for the federal crime of corruption, why was he not also prosecuted under state law for multiple counts of kidnapping, child abuse, and unlawful imprisonment?