After Hunter Biden pardon, activists ask president to 'extend same compassion' to cannabis prisoners

Despite committing to tackling mass incarceration during his presidential campaign, President Joe Biden has rarely used the presidential pardon to commute sentences during his time in office. As his term draws to a close and amid outrage over the pardon of his son Hunter, advocates are pressuring Biden — who has pardoned thousands who had been convicted of federal drug charges but were not incarcerated at the time of their pardons — to grant clemency to thousands more who are still in prison over cannabis offenses. The president has a chance to atone for his past support of “tough on crime” measures, says the Last Prisoner Project’s Jason Ortiz. He says Biden has an opportunity of “correcting the injustices that were done over the past 20 or 30 years” and should “extend the same grace and compassion” he showed his son Hunter “to all the folks that he helped put in prison to begin with.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

President Biden is continuing to face criticism over his decision to issue a sweeping pardon to his son Hunter Biden. But the president’s decision has also brought renewed attention to the power of the presidential pardon. Biden is now facing renewed pressure to commute the sentences of death row prisoners and to pardon or grant clemency to political prisoners like Indigenous leader Leonard Peltier, imprisoned in Florida, and the whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. The group Last Prisoner Project is calling on Biden to use his clemency power to free those still incarcerated in federal prison for cannabis crimes.

We’re joined now by Jason Ortiz, director of Strategic Initiatives at the Last Prisoner Project.

This is very interesting, Jason. I think they say that Hunter Biden has been clean for something like just over five years. His father has openly talked about his son, formerly an addict. And as he faces bipartisan criticism, talk about what you think this is an opening for.

JASON ORTIZ: Sure. So, this is definitely an opening for folks to talk about exactly how expansive we can use the pardon power of the president to make sure that we’re correcting the injustices that were done over the past 20 or 30 years when it comes to cannabis crimes. President Biden himself was actually one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill that created a lot of the outrageous sentences that we’re now dealing with today.

And so, we’re seeing that there are over 3,000 federal cannabis prisoners currently incarcerated on cannabis charges, and these are all folks that also have families and have parents and have loved ones. And we have examples, like folks like Jonathan Wall, who is somebody that was a Maryland resident. He was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for his first offense. And so, while I can understand why the president wants to have compassion for his own son, where we’re really getting frustrated is that he’s refusing to extend that compassion to all the parents that are currently watching their kids waste away in prison. Mitzi Wall, who works with the organization Freedom Grow, is the mother of Jonathan Wall. She was joining me this past week when we had the congressional press conference, when we were joined by folks like James Clyburn, Congressman James Clyburn, asking for freedom and clemency for folks like Jonathan Wall. And so, that’s one example of 3,000 folks that are currently in prison.

Some of the charges are far more egregious. Folks like Edwin Rubis was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison in the '90s. And so, he's someone that hasn’t had a Christmas or holidays with his family. He has a son that’s 27 years old. He has currently served 27 years of that federal sentence. He hasn’t had a single Christmas with his son because of charges that were orchestrated and architected by President Biden, then as senator, in the crime bill. We have folks that are serving life sentences. Ismael Lira, for a trafficking charge, is currently sentenced on a life sentence for the same activity that is now legal across the country in 25 —

AMY GOODMAN: Which is what?

JASON ORTIZ: — different states, including — trafficking. And so, that would be the distribution of cannabis. And so, there is a specific differentiation between what President Biden’s previous pardons were intended to do, which was only covering things like simple possession, where right now we have folks that are serving decades for trafficking, which is exactly what the hundreds of legal cannabis businesses across the country are currently doing on a regular basis, including right in Washington, D.C. And so, we’re now seeing people sitting in prison for decades for the same activity that is currently generating tax revenue for cities and states across the country. We’re paying for schools and building bridges with cannabis activity dollars, but still letting folks waste away in prison. And so, while I can definitely understand why a father would want to have compassion for his son and avoid prison time for his son, we’re really asking him to extend that same compassion to all the folks that he helped put in prison to begin with.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: [Jason], you mentioned the previous pardons for simple cannabis possession, but that hasn’t led to the release of many of those incarcerated individuals. Can you talk about that?

JASON ORTIZ: Yeah, absolutely. So, those pardons were for simple possession, for folks that were currently charged on a federal possession charge. And, now, it is very rare for someone to actually serve prison time for a simple possession charge at the federal level. That generally happens to folks — somebody maybe got caught; they were smoking at a national park or some other sort of federal property where they were unaware of it. But there are nobody in prison for simple possession in the federal prison system whatsoever. So, despite his pardoning of 6,000 charges, zero people were released.

However, the charges that we’re looking to actually have folks released for, things like cultivation of cannabis, sales of cannabis, those are the charges that folks are currently in prison for. And we want him to expand his use of the pardon to cover all cannabis crimes that are now legal in the majority of the country.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and, Jason, apologies, but, Jason, during your press conference last week, you spoke of, quote, “the heartbreaking number of Latino fathers incarcerated for life or near-life sentences.” How do these cases reflect systemic inequalities in federal sentencing?

JASON ORTIZ: So, we’ve seen for the past 50 years or so that the war on drugs has been racially motivated, specifically targeting young Black and Brown men, and many of those are Latinos, here in the city of New York. There was millions of arrests across the country. We’ve seen countless young fathers that have been ripped from their families, simply because they were trying to make money to help feed their families.

And so, I was somebody who was arrested in high school at the age of 16. I was lucky enough not to get incarcerated, but only because my parents were able to help me through this ridiculous legal process of keeping a 16-year-old out of prison.

And so, we’re seeing across the country that while these laws are changing, the retroactive relief and the restorative justice for the folks that were impacted has not followed suit with all of the cannabis profits that we’re seeing developed across the country. And we know without a doubt that the war on drugs was and is still racially motivated, specifically targeting Blacks and Latinos. And so, we’ve yet to actually wrestle with that real racist history of the war on drugs. We’re simply trying to just move on without addressing the past.

And I think the president has an incredible opportunity now to really address the issues that have been developed over the last few years by taking real expansive action, using his clemency power to commute the sentences of the folks that are currently in prison. And roughly half of the folks that are on our list of constituents are Latino. And you can see very clearly just by looking down the list of names who is in there and who is getting out in the future. And Latinos are definitely overrepresented in the prison population generally, but especially in the federal system for cannabis crimes.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you look at the clemency statistics by president, Biden is at almost the lowest, outside of George H.W. Bush. Biden, Trump, Obama, W., Clinton, H.W. and Reagan — he’s number two, among the lowest. Are you speaking directly, are your groups speaking directly with the Biden clemency office? How far are these demands going? You’re talking about thousands of people.

JASON ORTIZ: Yeah. So, we have met with White House officials multiple times, and we’ve explained exactly the folks that we believe are the top candidates for clemency. And while they have been receptive, they have not told us that they’re going to take any particular action to help these folks out at all.

And so, what we are really doing is hoping that they will take action sooner rather than later. It is true that most of the time most presidents use their clemency powers at the very end of their presidency. However, President Biden has clearly shown that he’s not going to wait for everyone to wait until the end of his presidency. He was willing to do it a little bit earlier for his son. And so, we’re asking him to extend the same grace and compassion to all the folks that are currently incarcerated and release them immediately, let them join their families for the holidays, let them see their families grow up, and bring joy and happiness back into their lives.

These are folks that have served a tremendous amount of time already. This is not folks that we’re saying did not commit the crime and should be, you know, released without any sort of punishment. Folks like Edwin Rubis have already served 27 years of their life in federal prison for a cannabis charge.

And so, while he could wait, we are asking him not to wait, to do this immediately, to show the people that his presidency is going to be one where he will be remembered as addressing the issues that he created and coming to this from a place of compassion, and not continuing the process and continuing the damage done by punitive drug policies.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Jason Ortiz, we thank you so much for being with us, director of strategic initiatives at the Last Prisoner Project.