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President Joe Biden announced today that he is commuting the sentences of nearly 2,500 federal inmates serving time for non-violent drug offenses.
“This action is an important step toward righting historic wrongs, correcting sentencing disparities, and providing deserving individuals the opportunity to return to their families and communities after spending far too much time behind bars,” the President said in a statement. “With this action, I have now issued more individual pardons and commutations than any president in US history.”
NORML had repeatedly called upon the Biden Administration to grant clemency to those serving federal sentences for non-violent marijuana offenses. In an op-ed in the New York Times in December, NORML Board Member Rick Steves wrote: “Polls have consistently shown that a significant majority of Americans support marijuana legalization. And on the campaign trail, Mr. Biden said that ‘no one should be in jail because of marijuana.’ … In the final weeks of his term, he should pardon all Americans who have federal convictions for nonviolent marijuana-related crimes, and commute the sentences of every single person who is sitting in federal prison today for those offenses. It’s the right thing to do.”
The full list of constituents receiving Presidential commutations is not yet publicly available.
On two occasions during his presidency, Biden issued pardon proclamations for those convicted of federal marijuana possession offenses. Estimates provided by the US Sentencing Commission suggested that nearly 7,000 Americans with low-level federal marijuana-related convictions were eligible for relief under the directives. In 2023, the Justice Department opened an online portal for eligible applicants to apply to receive hard copies of their pardon certificates.
During his term, the President also called upon states to take similar steps to either pardon or expunge those with state-level marijuana convictions. Publicly available data compiled by NORML finds that, in recent years, state courts have either expunged or sealed the records of more than two million marijuana-related cases.
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