Tell Biden: ‘Free them all!’

President Joe Biden issued commutations on Dec. 12 to an estimated 1,500 prisoners convicted of federal nonviolent acts, especially drug-related, as one of his final acts before he officially leaves office on Jan. 20, 2025. 

Most of those prisoners had already been released and put under home confinement for at a least a year. Their early releases occurred to help slow down the spread of the coronavirus within federal prisons. In addition, 39 other prisoners were pardoned for non-violent convictions. 

Biden claims that he is against the death penalty and could easily commute the sentences of 40 prisoners being held on the federal death row before pro-death penalty Donald Trump takes office. 

Commutation is a form of clemency. According to the Associated Press, “Clemency is the term for the power the president has to pardon, in which a person is relieved of guilt and punishment, or to commute a sentence, which reduces or eliminates the punishment but doesn’t exonerate the wrongdoing.” (Dec. 12) 

Weeks before granting commutations to the largest number of people in U.S. history, Biden granted a pardon for his son Hunter Biden, convicted of gun and tax violations.

In a public statement, Biden claimed, “America was built on the promise of possibility and second chances.” If that were really true, what about second chances for political prisoners? There are three notable prisoners being held in federal prison who were railroaded by the U.S. government.

First there is Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. As a victim of xenophobia, anti-Muslim discrimination and racism, Siddiqui is a Pakistani national who was falsely arrested and convicted for “terrorism” under the U.S. Patriot Act passed following 9/11. 

Siddiqui was illegally extradited from Pakistan and brought to the U.S. where she was sentenced to 86 years in prison for a crime she did not commit. She is currently housed in the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, a prison for women, where she has faced all forms of torture and inhumane isolation from her family. For many years, mass demonstrations have been held in the U.S., Pakistan and elsewhere demanding her freedom.

Second, there is Leonard Peltier. He is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and a longtime leader of the American Indian Movement. He was falsely sentenced to two life prison sentences in 1977 for allegedly killing two FBI agents in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He is currently incarcerated in the United States Federal Penitentiary, Leavenworth, in Kansas, and was recently denied parole in September. His supporters are demanding a compassionate release for the 80-year-old Peltier based on his failing health due to the lack of humane health care. 

And third is Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, aka H. Rap Brown. During the revolutionary period of the 1960s, Brown, along with the late Stokely Carmichael, aka Kwame Ture, were leaders of the Black Power Movement. They challenged white supremacy and the repressive COINTELPRO led by the notorious FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. 

Brown became a Muslim and changed his name. He moved to Atlanta to open up a mosque in order to serve the needs of the Black community, especially Black youth. In March 2000, Al-Amin was arrested and charged with the murder of a white sheriff’s deputy without any concrete evidence. He was sentenced to life without a chance for parole. The 80-year-old Al-Amin is currently being held in the United States Penitentiary-Tucson, in Arizona, after spending many years underground in solitary confinement in a Colorado supermax prison. His real “crime” was his heroic resistance to the racist U.S. status quo. 

The cases of federal prisoners, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, Leonard Peltier and Iman Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, may have historical differences, but their commonality is that they all are victims of a deeply flawed, systemically racist judicial system that seeks to silence them not only as individuals but also for the righteous struggles for social justice and national liberation they represent. 

That’s why we must continue to demand from the White House: “Free them all!”