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Fact check: How did the Department of Justice Office of the Pardon Attorney handle Biden-era clemency petitions by year?
Executive Summary
The Office of the Pardon Attorney’s publicly reported clemency statistics show a rising number of petitions pending at the start of each fiscal year across the Biden era, accompanied by fluctuations in petitions received, grants, and denials; the Biden administration also executed a large, single-day clemency action in December 2024. There are inconsistencies between datasets in the provided analyses—particularly in the count of petitions received each year—and competing narratives frame the administration’s performance either as significant progress on criminal-justice reform or as insufficient relative to backlogs and expectations [1] [2].
1. What the government’s own numbers claim—and where they diverge from other tallies
The Department of Justice Office of the Pardon Attorney’s reported fiscal-year snapshots list beginning-of-year pendency rising from 3,211 [3] to 3,848 [4], with grants increasing from 191 [3] to 466 [4]. These figures depict an office processing and granting more clemency over time even while the backlog grows [1]. A separate presentation asserting yearly totals includes markedly different annual “received” counts—e.g., 13,629 received in 2021 and 14,039 in 2022—numbers far larger than the series that lists 3,339 received in 2021 and 3,557 in 2022, exposing a data consistency problem in available summaries [1]. The divergence matters because conclusions about workload, throughput, and administrative performance change depending on which tally is treated as authoritative.
2. The year-by-year mechanics: pendency, receipts, grants, denials—what the numbers show
Across the datasets, the common throughline is more petitions pending year-to-year and more grants in later years, with grants rising from the low hundreds to the mid-hundreds by 2024. One dataset shows pendency climbing steadily (3,211 → 3,339 → 3,557 → 3,848) while grants grow (191 → 259 → 380 → 466) [1]. Denials, however, vary substantially between sources—one list shows denials spiking in 2022 to 3,705 then falling in 2023 to 1,361 before rising again in 2024—indicating differing definitions or reporting windows for “denied” and “closed without presidential action” [1]. Reconciling these operational metrics requires clarity on fiscal-year cutoffs and whether administrative closures or presidential decisions are counted consistently.
3. December 2024’s single-day action: scale and framing
President Biden’s December 12, 2024 action commuting nearly 1,500 sentences and pardoning 39 people stands out as the largest single-day clemency grant in modern history per the White House, and it materially shifted the administration’s cumulative clemency tallies [2] [5]. The White House framed the move as advancing equal justice and second chances, emphasizing rehabilitation and public-safety goals [5]. That action complicates year-to-year comparisons: a concentrated grant of this magnitude reduces person-level pendency immediately but does not resolve underlying systemic issues that drive the flow of new petitions, nor does it eliminate the need for ongoing processing capacity at the Office of the Pardon Attorney [2].
4. Critics, advocates, and the political narratives shaping interpretation
Advocates argue that the administration’s incremental increases in grants and the December 2024 action represent meaningful progress toward criminal-justice reform, including sentence commutations for those on home confinement and selective pardons for nonviolent convictions [2] [6]. Conversely, critics maintain the process is too slow and administratively inconsistent, pointing to thousands of pending petitions and arguing that single-day mass grants do not substitute for structural reform of clemency procedures [7]. The House committee analysis provided in the source set does not focus on clemency technicalities but rather raises unrelated concerns about presidential capacity; its inclusion signals how cleavage over presidential performance can intersect with debates about clemency administration and agenda-driven emphasis [8].
5. What’s missing and why it matters for interpreting performance
Publicly available summaries in the provided analyses omit consistent definitions for “received,” “granted,” “denied,” and “closed without presidential action,” and they do not always disclose processing timelines or the Office’s staffing and resourcing changes—key context for assessing year-to-year handling. Without standardized reporting and reconciled datasets, observers rely on different snapshots that lead to divergent assessments: one emphasizing rising grants and a historic mass action, another emphasizing persistent backlogs and operational shortcomings [1] [2]. Transparent, uniform metrics tied to fiscal-year rules are necessary to judge whether increases in grants translate into sustained reform or merely episodic relief.