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A midsummer reminder of all persons that Prez Trump has granted clemency to during the COVID-19 pandemic

By Douglas Berman

Drum-roll please….:

Roger Stone

Sadly, that one name amounts to the full list of persons to receive a clemency grant from Prez Trump during the period in which, as detailed on this BOP page, nearly 100 federal prisoners have died and nearly 10,000 have been infected by COVID-19. 

I am not really surprised that Prez Trump has entirely failed to deliver on his promise back in March to look at freeing elderly “totally nonviolent” offenders from federal prisons amid the  pandemic.  But I figure now is as good a time as any to highlight again that Prez Trump could and should, via just a stroke of a pen, bring clemency relief to the many, many federal prisoners who, like Roger Stone, are older, medically vulnerable and present no clear risk to public safety. 

Because Prez Trump seems now eager to do some things differently in response to his sagging poll numbers, perhaps he should consider focusing in this realm on something a lot more popular than he is.  Specifically, I am talking about marijuana, while imagining the positive press Prez Trump would likely garner by granting clemency to the lifer marijuana offenders assembled at the Life for Pot website.  Prez Trump seems to like the adulation he received after his clemency grant to Alice Marie Johnson two years ago, and I am suggesting he might really get some political juice if he granted clemency to a number of older marijuana offenders.  (Notably, a number of voters in a number of swing states like Arizona and Florida and Michigan seemingly care a lot about marijuana issues.)

I fear that Prez Trump is unlikely to improve his clemency record anytime soon.  But that will not keep me from using this setting to urge him to see the value in trying to do so.

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