Biden's Clemency Grants, 2024 Top Ten Lists, & More
Hello and Happy Final Month of 2024!
We’re going to get into today’s big clemency announcement from Biden as well as everyone’s favorite year-end tradition – the hallowed top 10 lists – in a second, but first, we want to invite you to two upcoming events. Tomorrow, there’s a kickoff for the newly formed Association of Gun Violence Reporters (registration and a little more info here) and on Monday we’re hosting a moderated Q&A with some brilliant experts on both state and federal clemency (very timely! Register for that here.)
We woke up this morning to President Biden announcing the commutation of 1,500 people’s sentences and the pardons of 39 people. This is the largest single-day act of commutations in modern Presidential history, which is absolutely something worth celebrating. Before we get into our lists (we love a good list) we want to add a few helpful pieces of context for those of you reporting on this (or just reading about it!)
None of today’s acts of clemency will result in people being freed from incarceration. Biden has indicated that he will likely grant more commutations and has the opportunity to focus those grants on incarcerated people serving very long sentences that wouldn’t be handed down under current law. If he does, evidence would certainly be on his side. Statistics show very, very low recidivism rates for people freed from prison through various acts of clemency. People released from prison through Oregon Governor Kate Brown’s COVID-19 clemency program had lower recidivism rates than people who finished their sentences, despite having been convicted of more serious offenses and being assessed as having a higher risk to recidivate. On the federal level, more than 13,000 people were released under the CARES Act, and 99.8% of them had not been rearrested for a new crime as of last year.
Evergreen: remember, eventually almost every person currently in prison (95% in state prisons, according to DOJ) is going to get out. Commutations, if they result in people being freed, typically change the release date by a matter of degrees, not whether or not release is possible.
There’s been mention of the 39 pardons being for ‘non-violent’ offenses, and it’s a good opportunity to remind audiences (and ourselves) that offense categories are murky and don’t always mean what we think they do.
There’s so much more to say on clemency, so please do join us on Monday at 2p EST. Bring your questions! The experts will have answers! Register on Zoom here. And if you’re looking for reporting resources in the meantime, here’s our new issue brief on the issue.
OK. TOP TEN TIME. Here are some of the best stories we read this year, and some of the most mind-boggling things that happened this year (truly a tough one to whittle down to ten).
10 of the Best Things We Read in 2024
This Mississippi Hospital Transfers Some Patients to Jail to Await Mental Health Treatment (Isabelle Taft, Mississippi Today/ProPublica)
This is an extremely well done and harrowing indictment of the (largely nonexistent) mental health care system in Mississippi (and the US at large) and how the sprawling infrastructure of the criminal punishment system is used, to everyone’s detriment, to bridge those gaps.
The Invisible Man (Patrick Fealey, Esquire)
Patrick Fealey writes a harrowing, infuriating, and beautiful first-hand description of a period of homelessness. The constant, needless harassment by police is one of the most upsetting things about Fealy’s account, along with the fact that the single act of generosity he experienced from a stranger during this period was 1 (one) woman offering him half her meatball sub in a beach parking lot.
How an Algorithm Turned Apartment Pools Green (Maureen Tkacik, The American Prospect)
In 2021, a group of Dallas apartments sold for $201 million, using wildly inflated valuations driven by an algorithm from the software Yieldstar, owned by RealPage (subject of current DOJ litigation). Maureen’s piece goes deep into how Yieldstar has been inflating housing prices nationwide, contributing to bonkers rent increases (between 50-80% in many cities!) and generally helping to make everything worse.
Will Prosecutors Charge Pro-Palestine Protestors? (Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, Ethan Corey, Jerry Iannelli, Meg O’Connor, The Appeal)
The Appeal asked over 100 prosecutors whether or not they planned on pursuing charges against pro-Palestine protestors. Spoiler alert! Almost every single one said yes.
He Was Convicted of Killing His Baby. The DA’s Office Says He’s Innocent, but That Might Not Be Enough. (Pam Colloff, ProPublica and The New York Times)
Pam Colloff never misses, and this look at a junk science conviction in Tennessee is an infuriating and fascinating look at the hubris and intractability of our criminal legal system.
The Cloud Under the Sea (Josh Dzieza, The Verge)
This is one of those articles that you didn’t necessarily think you were interested in but once you finish you have a completely different understanding of the world? It’s a great piece about the people who repair and maintain the information superhighway under the sea – a web of internet cables that literally keeps everything connected and functioning. Infrastructure week!
The Empathy Punishment (Reeves Wiedeman, New York Magazine)
A great piece that makes you think about punishment, class, and viral shaming. This could have been a surface look at a small example of retribution but instead was a thoughtful example of the limitations of a justice system.
Some Women Are Being Asked to Pre-Pay for Their Babies (Renuka Rayasam, KFF Health News)
Well, this one is exactly what the headline makes it sound like. Our healthcare hellscape means that some pregnant people are being asked to PRE-PAY for their babies’ births, while said babies are still in utero – leading some people to have to demand refunds if they miscarry.
Everyday Purchases (Jaed Coffin, Slate)
This is a beautiful piece focused on 24 hours in a community that experiences a mass shooting – this time in Lewiston, Maine –through the lens of the owners of a 7-Eleven. It covers so much more than gun violence – it’s a beautiful, in-depth look at the immigrant experience, rural life (and death), and more.
Locked in, Priced Out (Ethan Corey and Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, The Appeal)
Ok, yet another Appeal piece, but this is the first ever database of its kind - the most comprehensive record of prison commissary prices in the country, where markups for items are as high as 600%. A shining example of how we shift the cost of incarceration onto incarcerated people and their families.
Moving on to…
10 of the Mind-Boggling Things We Heard About in 2024
The DOJ ends a national program that had seized untold millions in cash from (innocent) airline passengers without arrests:
The DEA had a bad habit of searching random passengers at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport (and others) and, when they found no drugs or anything else illegal, stealing cash from the person searched. The rationale for searching passengers was purely vibes-based, with agents saying they stopped people based on “the…perception that the person is exhibiting characteristics indicative of drug trafficking without the officer having any independent predicating information,” which is a long way of saying they were racist and stopped mostly Black people in Atlanta, primarily Black men. An Atlanta News First investigation is the reason the DOJ ordered an end to this practice in airports across the country.
Police are starting to use AI chat bots to write police reports:
Great news! The same company that brought you tasers – Axon – is now selling AI tech that will generate police reports for officers. Axon is using the same generative AI that ChatGPT uses, and, as you perhaps will recall, ChatGPT has been known to confidently lie (or, rather, just make things up) over and over. This propensity to make things up is a known problem with large language models: it’s called hallucination, and it could mean AI adding convincing and hard-to-notice lies into police reports. No worries there!
Georgia fires the entire maternal deaths commission after they talk about maternal deaths:
This year, ProPublica did a lot of really great (and extremely sad) reporting on maternal deaths caused by abortion bans in Texas and Georgia. The state of Georgia (specifically the Department of Public Health!) responded to the reporting on Candi Miller and Amber Thurman’s very preventable deaths by… disbanding the current Maternal Mortality Review Committee for talking about, you know, forbidden stuff like the very issue their committee is tasked with investigating.
YSL RICO trial costs untold sums of taxpayer money for a racketeering trial that ends with no racketeering convictions:
Can’t pass up an opportunity to talk about this year’s biggest waste of taxpayer money! The YSL RICO was the longest running trial in Georgia history (honestly, a high bar to pass) and yet the end results were (embarrassingly for the prosecution): some gun convictions, the literal banishment of Young Thug from his hometown of Atlanta for a decade, multiple defendants being stabbed in jail, and years of pre-trial freedom lost for basically nothing. (Also, please, we beg one of you to do an investigation into the total cost of this case.)
Alabama commits to building $1 billion mega-prison (named after Gov. Kay Ivey):
Alabama, a state that refuses to provide basic care to its residents, is building a 10-figure prison. Where’d they get all that money? Well, some of it came from COVID-19 funds allotted by the federal government. Just what we all had in mind for “public health!” The state legislature’s excitement could only be described as dystopian: “It’s going to be larger than a lot of county seats,” Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, said. “We’re building a hospital. We’re building a mental health facility. We’re building a prison. And a community college. All in the same spot,” said Sen. Clyde Chambliss, R-Prattville, chairman of the prison oversight committee. No thanks!
2 probably innocent men executed in one 48-hour period:
Missouri executed Marcellus Williams on September 24, despite pretty clear evidence of his innocence in a 1998 murder. The victim’s family asked for his life to be spared, and more than one million people signed a petition supporting his innocence claims, including the sitting St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney. Oklahoma executed Emmanuel Littlejohn on September 26, despite the evidence of his innocence being so strong that the parole board recommended clemency in August (ultimately, Governor Kevin Stitt signed off on his killing).
Florida jails choose not to evacuate incarcerated people in the mandatory evacuation zone:
If you’re not chronically online you might not have heard about this – but, frankly, that’s only because of some meteorological luck. As Hurricane Milton was barreling down on the Southeast – mandatory evacuations were ordered in the Tampa area. Not included in those evacuations despite being in the mandatory evacuation zone? The Manatee County Jail and the Pinellas County Jail. The storm ended up not being the worst case scenario that it was predicted to be in Florida, but had it not veered off course it could have been a mass casualty event.
Albuquerque police “graduate” from their DOJ consent decree while shooting more civilians than ever:
It’s no secret that federal consent decrees aren’t a panacea when it comes to mitigating police violence against civilians – think of them as very pricey Performance Improvement Plans, just one where the employee can’t ever actually get fired. The Albuquerque Police had been under a consent decree for a decade, costing taxpayers $40 million (the independent monitor alone got paid $12 million!). In the first year of DOJ monitoring – 2014 – Albuquerque police shot 9 people. In 2023, the number was 13 — a 44% increase. SearchLight New Mexico also found the monitor’s reports consistently riddled with errors. Definitely the best way $40 million taxpayer dollars could’ve been spent!
Atlanta’s Inspector General Alleges High-Level Interference from City:
In May, Atlanta Inspector General Shannon Manigault stepped up to the podium during the City Council’s public comment period to sound an alarm bell: “The reason I’m here today is because the Office of the Inspector General is facing an emergency,” she said. “That’s not hyperbole.” Her office investigates allegations of misconduct/fraud/abuse across Atlanta’s many city agencies, and the city has interfered in that work to such an extent that she felt public comment was her only option. The kind of work the OIG does is illustrated in three recent investigations: one detailing nepotism within Atlanta’s HR department, another uncovering a senior executive’s scheme to secure a city vendor contract for another city employee, who was a friend, and the newest report from the office accuses the city of illegal favoritism during the bidding process for a new 311 software system.
Iowa Police (and others!) Illegally Sell Weapons of War:
The Chief of a three person police department in Adair, Iowa (population 794) spooked federal regulators when he tried to sell almost 100 machine guns (including one capable of shooting 6,000 rounds per minute) that he had (illegally) acquired. He was sentenced to 5 years in federal prison and had a real all-timer quote to CBS, as they were investigating other police officers illegally acquiring and selling weapons across the country: "If I'm guilty of this, every cop in the nation's going to jail!"
That’s all for now! We’ll be back with just one more list before the end of the year: things we’re thinking about heading into 2025.