President Joe Biden on Sunday posthumously pardoned Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who influenced Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders and was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s. Also receiving pardons were a top Virginia lawmaker and advocates for immigrant rights, criminal justice reform and gun violence prevention.
Congressional leaders had pushed for Biden to pardon Garvey, with supporters arguing that Garvey’s conviction was politically motivated and an effort to silence the increasingly popular leader who spoke of racial pride. After Garvey was convicted, he was deported to Jamaica, where he was born. He died in 1940.
The Rev Martin Luther King Jr said of Garvey: “He was the first man, on a mass scale and level” to give millions of Black people “a sense of dignity and destiny”.
It’s not clear whether Biden, who leaves office Monday, will pardon people who have been criticized or threatened by president-elect Donald Trump.
Issuing preemptive pardons – for actual or imagined offenses by Trump’s critics that could be investigated or prosecuted by the incoming administration – would stretch the powers of the presidency in untested ways.
Biden has set the presidential record for most individual pardons and commutations issued. He announced on Friday that he was commuting the sentences of almost 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. He also gave a broad pardon for his son Hunter, who was prosecuted for gun and tax crimes.
The president has announced he was commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, converting their punishments to life imprisonment just as Trump, an outspoken proponent of expanding capital punishment, takes office. In his first term, Trump presided over an unprecedented number of executions, 13, in a protracted timeline during the coronavirus pandemic.
A pardon relieves a person of guilt and punishment. A commutation reduces or eliminates the punishment but doesn’t exonerate the wrongdoing.
Others pardoned on Sunday included Don Scott, the speaker of the Virginia house of delegates, who was convicted of a drug offense in 1994 and served eight years in prison. He was elected to the Virginia legislature in 2019, and later became the first Black speaker.
Biden also pardoned immigrant rights activist Ravi Ragbir, who was convicted of a nonviolent offence in 2001 and was sentenced to two years in prison and was facing deportation to Trinidad and Tobago; Kemba Smith Pradia, who was convicted of a drug offense in 1994 and sentenced to 24 years behind bars, but has since become a prison reform activist; and Darryl Chambers, a gun violence prevention advocate who was convicted of a drug offense and sentenced to 17 years in prison, but who now studies and writes about gun violence prevention.
