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Pardons are one of the most important powers presidents have. With a swipe of their pen, they can erase a person’s federal criminal conviction, freeing them from prison if they’re locked up, and erasing the collateral consequences that often haunt people even after they’ve served their sentence. 1
The pardon power can help fix injustices in the criminal legal system and be a meaningful tool to reduce prison populations, but, unfortunately, in recent decades, this power has been severely underused.
President Trump, though, has broken with most of his recent predecessors, issuing pardons at a blistering pace since returning to office. In this piece, we take a closer look at President Trump’s pardons to understand what he’s gotten right, what he’s gotten wrong, and what can be done to make the pardon process better.
What Trump gets right about pardons
So far this year, President Trump has issued over 1,500 pardons. This is a huge number compared to the most recent presidents.2
However, it is important to remember, while President Trump has used his pardon power far more frequently than most recent presidents, it is still not enough. There are more than 200,000 people in federal custody on any given day. Trump’s 1,500 pardons represent less than 1% of the people locked up by the federal government.3
President Trump is right to use his pardon powers so sweepingly; in fact, to truly impact the criminal legal system, he should use the power more often. However, where the President goes wrong is in who is on the receiving end of these pardons.
What Trump gets wrong about pardons
While some have expressed outrage at President Trump’s recent pardons, the real problem isn’t how many people he has pardoned, but rather that he appears to be reserving that power just for his friends.
The vast majority of people who have been pardoned by President Trump are political and business allies:
- On day one of his second term, Trump issued a blanket pardon for people with January 6-related convictions and charges, accounting for the vast majority of his pardons.
- In October, the president pardoned billionaire Changpeng Zhao, who has business connections with the Trump family.
- In November, Trump preemptively pardoned political allies Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and Sidney Powell, among others, none of whom were currently facing federal criminal charges.
It should go without saying, but people should not need a connection to the president to have a shot at a pardon.
Meanwhile, roughly 10,000 people have filed petitions for pardons or commutations at the federal level just this year, and only 10 have been granted. The rest should not be ignored just because they do not have the political sway of Trump’s friends and allies.
Pardoning friends and allies, while ignoring nearly everyone else, isn’t just bad optics. It undermines public confidence in the process and can result in skepticism of future pardon decisions. Presidents are already hesitant to issue pardons; if the public is skeptical, it’ll make use of this power even more rare.
Making pardons fairer and more accessible
In the aftermath of Trump’s actions, some have called for misguided changes that would make pardons even more uncommon. “Reforms” that make a pardon more inaccessible to the average person behind bars are not the solution.
Instead, there are things the U.S. can do to actually improve clemency and the pardon process, making it more frequent, accessible, and fair. A good place to start would be passing the FIX Clemency Act, which would:
- Eliminate the Office of the Pardon Attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and replace it with an independent board of experts who would provide the President with recommendations on who should receive clemency.
- Create greater transparency in the clemency process by publicly disclosing Board activities and recommendations.
- Protect applicants for clemency from greater prosecution.
Importantly, presidents can only offer pardons for federal crimes — a relatively small portion of the overall number of people behind bars. However, governors can issue pardons for state criminal convictions. They should learn from the steps and missteps of President Trump and use their pardon powers more frequently.
Similarly, advocates should be calling for an expansion of pardons that directly benefits people entangled in the criminal legal system, regardless of their political or economic connections.
Footnotes
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Pardons are one of two forms of clemency powers that presidents and governors have. The other, commutations, allows them to reduce a person’s sentence, without eliminating it altogether. To learn more about commutations, see our report, Executive Inaction. ↩
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It is worth noting that President Biden granted pardons by proclamation for people convicted of certain federal marijuana offenses and veterans convicted of having gay sex while enlisted in the military. Unfortunately, there is no data that exists showing exactly how many people benefitted from these actions, which required recipients to go through a formal process to receive pardon certificates. The information that does exist suggests the number of people seeing practical impacts from these pardons was relatively small. ↩
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This is not a perfect comparison because some of the people who received pardons from President Trump were not incarcerated or convicted, but it does provide useful context in showing just how small a role these pardons played in reducing the number of people trapped in the carceral system. ↩
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