WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden on Sunday posthumously pardoned Marcus Garvey, a black supremacist who inspired Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders and was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s. I did it. Also pardoned was a prominent Virginia lawmaker and advocate for immigrant rights, criminal justice reform, and gun violence prevention.
Congressional leaders have called on Mr. Biden to pardon Mr. Garvey, and his supporters say his conviction was politically motivated and an attempt to silence a leader who is increasingly popular for speaking out about racial pride. He claimed that it was an effort. After Garvey was convicted, he was deported to his native Jamaica. He died in 1940.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said of Garvey, “He was the first on a large scale and level to give millions of black people a sense of dignity and destiny.”
It is unclear whether Biden, who leaves office on Monday, will pardon people who have been criticized or threatened by President-elect Donald Trump.
Granting preemptive pardons for real or imagined crimes by Trump critics that could be investigated and prosecuted by the next administration would expand presidential power in an untested way. Dew.
Biden set a presidential record for the most individual pardons and commutations. On Friday, he announced commuting the sentences of about 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes. He also granted a major pardon to his son Hunter, who was charged with gun and tax crimes.
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The president announced that the sentences of 37 of the 40 federal death row inmates will be commuted to life in prison as President Trump, a vocal supporter of expanding the death penalty, takes office. During his first term, President Trump presided over an unprecedented 13 executions during a lengthy schedule amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Pardon frees a person from guilt and punishment. A commutation reduces or eliminates punishment but does not absolve the wrongdoer.
Among those pardoned on Sunday were:
Don Scott is the chairman of the Virginia House of Delegates, which is narrowly controlled by Democrats. He was convicted of drug offenses in 1994 and sentenced to eight years in prison. He was elected to the Virginia General Assembly in 2019 and later became the first Black speaker. Immigrant rights activist Ravi Raghbir was convicted of a nonviolent crime in 2001, sentenced to two years in prison, and faced deportation to Trinidad and Tobago. Kemba Smith Pradia was convicted of drug crimes in 1994 and sentenced to 24 years in prison. Since then, she has become a prison reform activist. President Bill Clinton commuted his sentence in 2000. Darryl Chambers of Wilmington, Delaware, is a gun violence prevention activist who was convicted of drug crimes and sentenced to 17 years in prison. He researches and writes about gun violence prevention.
“I am deeply humbled to share that I received a presidential pardon from President Joe Biden for a mistake I made in 1994 that changed the course of my life and led to my redemption,” Scott said in a statement. It taught me true power.”
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Mr. Biden commuted the sentences of both men. One is Michelle West, who was serving a life sentence for her role in a drug conspiracy in the early 1990s. West has a daughter who has written publicly about the hardships of growing up with a mother in prison.
Another person whose sentence was commuted was Robin Peoples, who was sentenced to 111 years in prison after being convicted of bank robbery in northwest Indiana in the late 1990s. The White House said in a statement that under current law, people could receive significantly reduced sentences today.
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Associated Press writer Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report.
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