Biden's clemency and pardon list includes former elected official, lawyers and medical bill company owner
The president commuted more than 1,500 sentences, setting a record for the most executed by a president in a single day.
WASHINGTON — A county commissioner who was convicted of taking nearly half a million dollars’ worth of bribes, including a stone-fired pizza oven; a tax attorney wrapped up in the “biggest tax fraud prosecution ever”; and the owner of a Detroit-area Medicare billing company who orchestrated a $26 million Medicare fraud.
All had their federal sentences commuted by President Joe Biden on Thursday in the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history.
Biden commuted close to 1,500 sentences and pardoned 39 people in a sweeping and historic act for people who had been convicted of nonviolent crimes — many related to illegal drugs — and released from prison more than a year ago under a pandemic-era law, the CARES Act, to limit crowding in federal prisons.
Many of those who received pardons had long ago completed their sentences, but the crimes will now be wiped from their records.
Biden said in a statement that Sherranda Janell Harris, a Connecticut woman who was convicted on federal drug charges at 24, had been pardoned. Now 43, she has worked in the finance and real estate sectors, is committed to her faith and church, and has been described as a role model for young women in her community.
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