President Biden is nearing the end of his presidency and the pressure to fulfill his campaign promise of ending the federal death penalty is mounting, especially after deciding to pardon his son, Hunter Biden. CAFE Contributor Rachel Barkow joins Elie Honig to discuss presidential pardons, the death penalty, and President Biden’s track record on both.
This is the latest installment of a new special series of episodes exclusively for members of CAFE Insider. Each week, Elie Honig and special guests will tackle one major legal or policy issue, helping you stay informed. Let us know what you think. Write to us at letters@cafe.com.
This podcast is brought to you by CAFE and Vox Media Podcast Network.
Executive Producer: Tamara Sepper; Editorial Producer II: Jake Kaplan; Associate Producer: Claudia Hernández; Audio Producer: Nat Weiner; Deputy Editor: Celine Rohr; CAFE Team: David Tatasciore, Matthew Billy, Noa Azulai, and Liana Greenway.
Elie Honig:
From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to CAFE Insider. I’m Elie Honig.
On this week’s show, we have a very timely topic for you. The president’s pardon power. Of course, this is receiving increased attention the last several days following President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter Biden. And with Biden’s presidency coming to an end soon, there are questions about whether he’ll extend clemency to other cases. For example, will he commute the sentences of the 40 or so people who are currently on federal death row. At the same time, there’s an ongoing debate about whether the death penalty should be outlawed altogether. Well, we have the perfect guest today for this conversation.
I am joined by Rachel Barkow. You all know her in CAFE world, she’s a CAFE contributor, a professor at NYU Law School. Previously she served on the United States Sentencing Commission. That’s a whole separate podcast we’re going to do. I’m going to ask you about the guidelines and more relevant to today an expert on criminal justice and the president’s pardon power. And Rachel, I will tell our audience, you know this, that we had planned to do this podcast and focus on two things, the death penalty, which we’ll get to and the pardon power, but we plan to do this before the Hunter Biden pardon happened. And then it has happened in the meantime. So we’ve got plenty to talk about, Rachel.
