Notable accounting and accounts of Prez Biden’s last mass commutations and their implementation

Law360 has this interesting new and lengthy article about how Prez Biden’s mass clemency of drug offenses in his final few days of office have been playing out.  The piece is headlined “For Many Biden Clemency Grantees, Freedom Is On Hold,” and it merits a full read.  Here are some excerpts:

When James Kirby Burks’ family saw his name on a list of about 2,500 people to whom former President Joe Biden had granted clemency in his final days in office, they were overjoyed. Burks has been in federal prison for 32 years, serving a life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense in the ’90s.  “We had been fighting for so long, and to finally see someone was listening and heard us, it was just tears pouring out of me, just being thankful,” Burks’ sister Robin Davis told Law360 in late February.

But the joy was short-lived.  Even though her brother’s life sentence had been lifted, he wasn’t home free, Davis said. Burks is one of the nearly 700 clemency recipients whom Biden specified couldn’t be released until this July….

In granting nearly 2,500 commutations on Jan. 17, Biden set the record for most acts of clemency in a single day, and his office said at the time that the action was intended to address the racial and socioeconomic disparity in sentences between crack and powder cocaine offenses….

As of March 6, just 383 of Biden’s clemency recipients had been released fully from prison, 325 had been moved to a halfway house or home confinement, and the other 1,783 inmates were still in prison, according to data Law360 collected from the BOP’s inmate locator….

There are several reasons for the delay in the release of Biden’s clemency recipients, experts told Law360, but at the root of it all is Biden’s choice to do a staggered release structure. In one of four executive grants of clemency Biden issued in his last few days in office, thousands of names were sorted into different sections based on when their sentence is set to expire, with roughly 200 prisoners who could be released in February, and then the rest staggered among release dates in March, April, May and July, in which the largest chunk of 675 recipients are to be released.