Biden commutes sentence of cash for kids judge
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Needless to say, this is much less defensible than the pardon of Hunter Biden:
Victims of a former Pennsylvania judge convicted in the so-called kids-for-cash scandal are outraged by Joe Biden’s decision to grant him clemency.
In 2011, Michael Conahan was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison after he and another judge, Mark Ciavarella, were found guilty of accepting $2.8m in illegal payments in exchange for sending more than 2,300 children – including some as young as eight years old – to private juvenile detention centers.
Conahan was released from prison in 2020 due to Covid-19 and placed on house arrest, which had been scheduled to end in 2026.
Conahan’s sentence was one of about 1,500 the US president commuted – or shortened – on Thursday while also pardoning 39 Americans who had been convicted of non-violent crimes.
In response to Conahan’s pardon, the mother of a boy sent to jail at age 17 before later dying by suicide told the Citizens’ Voice: “I am shocked and I am hurt.”
“Conahan’s actions destroyed families, including mine, and my son’s death is a tragic reminder of the consequences of his abuse of power,” Sandy Fonzo said to the outlet. “This pardon feels like an injustice for all of us who still suffer. Right now I am processing and doing the best I can to cope with the pain that this has brought back.”
Similarly, Amanda Lorah, who at age 14 was wrongfully imprisoned as part of the scheme, told WBRE: “It’s a big slap in the face for us once again.
“We had … time taken away from us. We had no one to talk to, but now we’re talking about the president of the United States to do this. What about all of us?”
The Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, also condemned Biden’s decision, telling reporters that his fellow Democrat “got it absolutely wrong”, the Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported.
What happened here sort of encapsulates the strahgths and weaknesses of Biden’s presidency in a nutshell. The ACLU made a reasonable-on-its-face request to Biden with broad parameters, and Biden apparently just went ahead and did it without having his staff check the list of potential committees (or entrusting someone who did a bad job) to eliminate egregious cases like a judge who systematically took bribes and kickbacks to incarcerate innocent children or a public official who embezzled $50 million:
Biden’s general political orientation has been reasonably good, the attention to detail and ability to assess tradeoffs carefully much less so.
This is relevant to a larger debate about “The Groups” that has been taking place within the broader left. My basic take would be that 1)it’s good that progressive groups have more influence in the party than they did 20 years ago, 2)not all groups who purport to speak for a particular constituency necessarily do on every issue, and this needs to be taken into account, and 3)”receptive” doesn’t mean “go along to get along even if it means doing something that is bad on the merits or when the policy juice isn’t worth the political squeeze.” In this specific case, I’m glad that Biden is listening to the ACLU; I’m less glad that he didn’t exercise some independent judgment and have the list given looked over more carefully, and there’s a bigger lesson in this.