“Me, personally, I think it’s a great thing because certain people are imprisoned for crimes, and the laws have changed. And I think they change every few years or something like that. Like, if someone is doing time for marijuana possession, those laws have changed now. You have people that are in prison right now for marijuana in the ’80s, but now weed is legal, so I think them people should get pardons. I think it’s all right. I think pardons are good.”
“I think there should be a pardon if the person actually wasn’t guilty of something that they really didn’t do, whether or not they know them, or if it is publicized and everybody knew about it. But the ones that no one knows, who are guilty, and he forgives them—then that’s totally favoritism and just using your power unnecessarily.”
“I believe in the beginning it was a good thing. However, like most of the articles in our governing documents, it’s time to revisit. It’s time for amendments. It’s time for change, because now presidential pardons are full of bias of the president. It’s no longer about what’s good for the people or what’s good for the country—it’s an individual interest.”
“To begin with, people shouldn’t be in jail. But I think when you give the state too much power, then that becomes an issue, because then it’s hard to discern who should live and who should die, and who should be in prison. Those are all completely different things, and I don’t think the justice system has effectively shown that it’s capable of answering those questions for everyone, in every instance.”
“Watching the way Trump does his pardons right now, he’s doing pardons because he’s trying to get Black people’s support. But at the same time, he wants to deport all the people of color, especially Haitians and Africans. Every single president does pardons at the end of their term; they really don’t do it at the beginning of their terms. So, seeing Trump operate the way he’s operating at the beginning of his term, he has some kind of plan in place to partner with these Black people he just got, right? So, the politicization of it is ugly, it’s nasty, and it’s not even equitable, and it should be used in a place where people are actually up to be released.”
“I try not to inundate my mind with the Trump nonsense that we are experiencing, but from what I understand about pardons is, pardons are an end-of-the-president’s-time-in-office to do something good. Right now, Trump is taking advantage of the office, benefiting himself, family, and friends. I think it was wrong of him to pardon the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.”
