U.S. Pardon Attorney for the Biden Admin Says They Take ‘Racial Disparities’ Into Consideration When Recommending People for Clemency and Pardons

Reporter: “We’ve heard suggestions from the Biden Administration that the president is going to focus on certain categories of individuals that are especially deserving of clemency. In particular, we’ve heard mention of addressing racial disparities within the Bureau of Prisons system. What are your office’s priorities in terms of approaching this backlog of cases?”
OYER: “So let me make clear that the Office of the Pardon Attorney is not the ultimate decision maker on clemency or even what the clemency priorities are. But we do make a recommendation, and the recommendation that we make is an important part of the process. And our recommendations are based on a wide variety of factors. Systemic racial disparities are absolutely a factor that we take into consideration in making our recommendations on clemency. To be clear, we don’t look at the race of individual clemency petitioners, that’s not a piece of information that we ask for in our clemency petition or that we solicit, but we do, of course, consider all of the data from the Sentencing Commission and other sources that shows systemic racial disparities that are baked into certain sentencing laws and practices.”