President Biden pardoned five activists and public servants on Sunday, including a posthumous grant of clemency to the civil rights leader Marcus Garvey, who mobilized the Black nationalist movement and was convicted of mail fraud in 1923.
Mr. Biden also commuted the sentence of two people who are serving sentences for crimes that they committed in the 1990s that would keep them behind bars for the rest of their lives. The two individuals, Robin Peoples and Michelle West, had overwhelming support from civil rights activists and will be released next month, Mr. Biden said.
It was the latest act of clemency in Mr. Biden’s final weeks in office, many of which have highlighted Mr. Biden’s longstanding relationship among Black communities and his evolution on civil rights and criminal justice.
The president has announced thousands of individual pardons and commutations, more than any other president, in seeking to reverse longstanding disparities in convictions and sentencing laws that have disproportionately affected minority communities. Mr. Biden said that Sunday’s clemency recipients had “demonstrated remorse, rehabilitation and redemption,” and “each made significant contributions to improving their communities.”
“The list is not only important because of each and every individual that is represented on it, but it’s also important because of the broader story that it tells about the failures of our criminal legal system,” said Janai Nelson, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
During a visit to Royal Missionary Baptist Church, a storied Black church near Charleston, S.C., Mr. Biden said that his decisions reflected how he had come to view the power of “redemption.”
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