There has been harsh criticism of Trump for having pardoned or commuted the sentences of violent criminals in his grandiose, yet shallow, display of pandering to his MAGA base that saw them as patriots and hostages. To those who believe in faeries, he was a hero, kind of keeping his campaign promise and bringing home the well intended, if none too bright, patriots he told to storm the Congress to save the nation.
To others, he was his usual simplistic fool, doing pretty much what one would expect of any simplistic fool, uninterested in distinguishing between unworthy defendants and unwilling to put in the effort when the only purpose of his act was to pander to sycophants who similarly wouldn’t care either way. It was a cheap way for Trump to buy himself some adoration and, if necessary, useful idiots to take to the streets again if he needed some very fine people to do his dirty work.
And that’s why Joe Biden has no excuse, none, for his pardon of Adrian Peeler.
Adrian Peeler served a 20-year state prison sentence for murder conspiracy in the 1999 shootings of Leroy “B.J.” Brown and his mother, Karen Clarke, in Bridgeport — killings that shocked the city and led to improvements in state witness protection. Prosecutors said Brown and his mother were assassinated to prevent the child from testifying in another murder case.
In December 2021, Peeler finished his state sentence but began serving a 15-year term in federal prison for dealing large amounts of crack cocaine.
The federal sentence would have kept him behind bars until 2033. He is now set to be released in July.
Biden commuted Peeler’s sentence as one of the non-violent drug defendants. It isn’t difficult to see how this happened, as his federal sentence was for drug, following upon his state case for murder.
A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Connecticut, which prosecuted the drug case against Peeler, said Wednesday that it was not consulted or notified in advance about Peeler’s clemency. The office declined further comment.
It’s likely that someone, or some organization, put together a list based solely on the most superficial criteria, and Peeler’s case, where is original sentence of 35 years had been reduced to 15 years, popped up. And so he was tossed into the bunch of defendants to be commuted in a rush at the end of Biden’s term. Indeed, many, myself included, called for Biden to commute the extreme sentences imposed on drug defendants during the years when ever-higher sentences were believed to be the cure for the drug epidemic.
On Jan. 17, the White House boasted that Biden had issued more pardons and commutations “than any president in U.S. history.”
“Today, I am commuting the sentences of nearly 2,500 people convicted of non-violent drug offenses who are serving disproportionately long sentences compared to the sentences they would receive today under current law, policy, and practice,” Biden said in a statement.
The two situations are not remotely comparable. Trump knew that pardoning or commuting the sentences of January 6 defendants included, by definition, those who violently attacked Capital Police Officers. He just didn’t care. Biden, on the other hand, did not know that Jason Peeler was a killer who, atop his murder, was also convicted for being a drug dealer. But then, Biden failed to put in the effort to adequately vet those whose sentences he was commuting to distinguish between killers and drug dealers serving excessive sentences.
That Biden didn’t know, and didn’t take the time or put in the effort, to figure out whether each and every defendant whose sentence he commuted was worthy of his mercy, may be understandable, but is nonetheless inexcusable. We have a monstrous bureaucracy of people who could have put in the effort to figure out whether each of the “almost 2500” were worthy of commutation.
There are people in the Department of Justice whose job it is to vet every application for a pardon or commutation to ascertain whether they are appropriate candidates. Did they consider Jason Peeler? No one asked the United States Attorney’s office for Connecticut whether to cut Peeler a break. Did anyone even look at him, at his conduct, at the harm he cause when he murdered a child?
Despite our vast and very expensive bureaucracy, “mistakes” like this happen. They shouldn’t. They can’t. Yet they do, and they happen with pathetic regularity. The commutation of Peeler’s sentence is but one example, but a particularly curious one given how easily it could have been avoided had the slightest effort been employed to such a serious act as a commutation.
For all the people employed, and all the money spent, there remains inadequate concern that the government just can’t manage to get it right, to think things through, to do its job without screwing something up and harming people in the process. Apologists will explain that it’s just one mistake out of “almost 2500,” and mistake happen. Nonsense. Had there been any serious thought put into who these “almost 2500” were, it would have been recognized that Jason Peeler was not someone worthy of commutation. There is no justification for this mistake to happen. Indeed, this mistake should never happen.
Trump’s pardon of cop beaters was the product of his carelessness and laziness, both of thought and deed. But neither Biden nor the Democrats can claim to stand atop some moral mountain when they can’t manage to use the vast and inordinately expensive resources provided them upon the backs of working Americans to not commit avoidable mistakes. The two acts may be very different, but the net result to the public is that the government has failed us, yet again.