Biden is reportedly moving quickly to start issuing pardons

Joe Biden. — (Image credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

President Biden may begin issuing pardons before the 2022 midterms, The New York Times reports.

Per the Times, administration officials have begun evaluating clemency requests, and activists have said they feel they're getting the sense pardons and commutations may be signed by the president within the next year or two. "We asked them not to wait to the end of a term to execute pardon and commutation power for photo ops, and they definitely assured us that is not this administration's plans," DeAnna Hoskins, the president of the criminal justice group JustLeadershipUSA, told the Times. Hoskins participated in a Zoom call between White House officials and formerly incarcerated citizens last month.

While Biden appears to be getting the ball rolling early, the process itself will be quite deliberate and in conjunction with the Justice Department, which oversees a "rigorous application vetting process," the Times reports. That differs from former President Donald Trump's pardon approach, the Times notes, which often bypassed the Justice Department and instead relied on "an ad hoc network of friends and allies."

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Not everyone loves that idea, though. Desmond Meade, a voting rights activist who is seeking a federal pardon for a decades-old military conviction for stealing liquor and electronics on Navy bases while he was serving in the Army, said the Justice Department's application is "way too bureaucratic" and "daunting." He tried to convince the Biden administration to move the process outside the department, but it appears they are not inclined to do so, the Times reports. Read more at The New York Times.

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Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.