President Joe Biden’s mass clemency has faced backlash as it included a judge in the infamous “kids-for-cash” scandal. And a new report Friday evening said the White House did so without considering the specifics of the case.
President Joe Biden’s mass clemency has faced backlash as it included a judge in the infamous “kids-for-cash” scandal. And a new report Friday evening said the White House did so without considering the specifics of the case.
These kinds of accidental pardons happen all the time with mass pardons in countries that don’t have a proper vetting process in place. Usually it involves lawyers putting a rich asshole in the middle of a box of reasonable pardon requests so it will pass a cursory inspection or in the worst case scenario a single person that slips the name in.
The difference between the US and other countries, is that most countries tend to put formal processes in place to prevent these situations from happening, at least as often.
There are a lot of things we’ve found over the last decade or so that simply don’t have official processes, rules, or laws to enforce and instead have just been things that were done a certain way by tradition or historical gentleman’s agreements.