Biden commutes nearly 1,500 sentences and pardons 39 people | The Excerpt
On Friday’s episode (first released on December 13, 2024) of The Excerpt podcast: President Joe Biden Thursday announced he is commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 people who were placed on home confinement during the COVID pandemic and pardoning 39 others convicted of nonviolent crimes. For more on presidential pardons, check out our special episode. Paste BN National News Reporter Michael Loria talks about the rise in 3D-printed guns. College students may soon benefit from two new bipartisan federal laws. Paste BN National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise discusses some of America's unusual Christmas food traditions.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Friday, December 13th 2024. This is The Excerpt.
Today, how Biden commuted nearly 1,500 sentences, plus what we know about 3D-printed guns in the wake of the killing of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. And we talk about some special regional twists on Christmas food.
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President Joe Biden is commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 people and pardoning 39 others in the largest single day act of clemency in modern history, the White House announced yesterday. The amnesty will be extended to people who were placed on home confinement during the COVID pandemic and others who are convicted of nonviolent crimes, especially drug crimes, who have shown successful rehabilitation, according to a White House press release.
Biden said in the statement he would take more steps in the weeks ahead and continue to review clemency petitions. Biden and his senior aides are considering potential preemptive pardons for individuals they fear President-elect Donald Trump might target for criminal investigations. And criminal justice advocates, though pleased by Biden's moves Thursday, want him to sign off on all 10,000 pending clemency petitions. Other activists and progressive Democrats are urging Biden to commute the sentences of 40 men on federal death row, fearing the return of Trump will restart federal executions, which had been paused under the Biden administration. For more on presidential pardons, check out our deep dive from yesterday afternoon. We have a link in today's show notes.
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The suspect charged in the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has been linked to the scene of the crime through fingerprints and a gun police in Pennsylvania found during his arrest, police said on Wednesday. And police found a 3D-printed gun on suspect Luigi Mangione, the latest in a troubling trend marking the growing use of the homemade weapons. I spoke with Paste BN national news reporter Michael Loria about he and reporter Nick Penzenstadler's findings. Michael, thanks for hopping on today.
Michael Loria:
Thanks so much for having me on.
Taylor Wilson:
So, Michael, 3D-printed ghost guns back in the news in a big way in recent weeks. Can you just help us understand how this technology works? I think this is still confusing to some folks. It's still a little confusing to me. And it's not just guns, right, Michael, other types of weapons can be 3D printed and assembled as well?
Michael Loria:
You pile up layer on layer of this wet material, it's usually plastic and then it hardens into whatever type of design that you're trying to make. In this case, we're talking about guns, but also much more than guns, as we've seen with what police found in Luigi Mangione's backpack at a McDonald's in Pennsylvania. It was not just a gun, but also a silencer, which I think is catching a lot of the eyes of the experts that I've been speaking with.
Taylor Wilson:
So, beyond this shooting out of New York, I mean, how big of a rise are we seeing just in general and how common these weapons are and what might be driving this?
Michael Loria:
This technology became publicly available around a decade ago, and although the designs were readily available online, actually getting ahold of a printer and creating a firearm was prohibitively expensive. Printing a gun in 2024 is a far cry from what it was. You can go online now and basically get a sort of a DIY starter kit, which includes a printer, the filaments, which is the plastic material that the printer uses to create a design, and also blueprints for a pistol, all for around $300. That's significantly cheaper than some Star Wars Legos designs that you can find out there. But of course, we're not talking about Legos here. We're talking about firearms, which people can print and use for hobbies, but also use for violent crimes, including murder.
Taylor Wilson:
Yeah. Well, that was a good breakdown for us, Michael. So, what do critics say about this technology being available to the public in this way?
Michael Loria:
The thing is, is that if you look at numbers from federal officials, you can basically see the impact that the falling price points have been having. I think it was in 2017 where police recovered around 1,600 ghost guns, which includes other types of homemade guns as well as 3D-printed guns. By 2022, that number had shot up to 25,000 ghost guns recovered. So, obviously that's a massive difference. That's an incredible growth. I think it's like 1,500%.
Taylor Wilson:
Wow. So, Michael, is there any oversight here? I know that this is kind of at the heart of the issue, right? The idea behind firearms is that they are traceable and that law enforcement has some of these resources available typically after crimes are committed. But is there any oversight when it comes to these types of weapons, these 3D-printed guns?
Michael Loria:
There are some states that ban the practice outright, or if you do make a gun at home, you have to bring it in to get it serialized. But I think it's just 15 states that have any regulation on the books regarding this. And of course, this relies on people volunteering to do that. So, if you're someone who's trying to commit a crime, I guess, hypothetically, you would not be the type of person that would bring this gun in to get serialized, which is kind of where the issue is here.
This has also caught the attention of the White House. I think it was just recently the Biden administration announced an executive order where they started looking into essentially trying to diagnose how widespread this problem is and what types of actions they can take to combat it. But of course, this is coming pretty late in the Biden administration, not sure where it will go. We'll have to wait and see.
Taylor Wilson:
How does the gun rights community approach this conversation?
Michael Loria:
I think that a lot of folks that we've spoke with in our reporting, they'll defend this as the latest iteration of a cherished American tradition of making firearms at home and just using the latest technology. I think others also really do enjoy this as a hobby. You can create some quite nifty things at home using these things. Some of these people are a little worried what type of impact the Mangione case will have on this and whether they'll still be able to enjoy this type of thing at home or not.
Taylor Wilson:
So, Michael, we talked about the Biden initiative here. What else is next? Could this New York shooting be a turning point? I mean, what do we expect on this conversation going into 2025 and beyond?
Michael Loria:
I can't say that I've heard a lot of people expecting any major changes to come out of this, but we'll see. But I think that one of the interesting things to highlight here is the silencer found on Mangione, because I think it points to where this type of technology could go without some type of oversight, at least this is according to some of the experts I've spoke with.
I was talking with this guy who was a retired NYPD detective, and he spent a lot of his time at NYPD busting gun smugglers, and he now was impressed by the fact that folks now can just create the guns at home. But not only that, they can create silencers in order to help avoid things like gunshot detection technology. They can also create these things called switches, which essentially turn a semiautomatic weapon into an automatic weapon. The US military debuted a 3D-printed grenade launcher in 2017 that also uses 3D-printed grenades. And even right now in Ukraine, fighters are using 3D-printed bombs. It's a wild world.
Taylor Wilson:
Michael Loria covers national news for Paste BN. Thank you, Michael.
Michael Loria:
Thanks so much for having me on.
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Taylor Wilson:
College students may soon benefit from two new bipartisan federal laws, one that gives families extra time to apply for financial aid, and another aimed at curbing on-campus hazing. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed the FAFSA Deadline Act, which requires the US Department of Education to make October 1st the official launch date each year of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid or FAFSA. If agency officials can't meet that deadline, the secretary of education must testify before Congress, explain any delays and estimate their potential cost to families according to the law.
Also, on Wednesday, the Senate passed the Stop Campus Hazing Act, landmark legislation that would broaden the definition of hazing and compel colleges to disclose every hazing incident on campus. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.
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It's not snow or freezing temperatures that signal the holiday season in some parts of America. Sometimes it's seasonal harvest. I caught up with Paste BN national correspondent Elizabeth Weise to discuss some of America's unusual Christmas foods. Happy holidays, Beth.
Elizabeth Weise:
Hey. Merry Christmas to you.
Taylor Wilson:
Thanks for helping out. This was an interesting piece. People think of turkey and ham this time of year, and a lot of people eat those things, but there are these kind of interesting little quirks around the country, and I want to start with where you are, Beth, in San Francisco, where it's all about crab this time of year. Fill folks in who aren't from the Bay Area. Does this replace the usual ham or turkey? Is this an addition? How do folks eat it?
Elizabeth Weise:
I mean, I know folks for whom it does replace ham or turkey or whatever, but it's typically something that you have right around this time. So, a Dungeness crab feast, and it's because this is when the Dungeness crab harvest season starts. So, they're around, they're plentiful. They used to be relatively cheap. That's not so true anymore. My family does this. You get a couple of crab and children scream because they're alive and they're in the sink and they're crawling all over the place. And you put them in boiling water. Oh, we'll probably get emails about that. You have it with a lot of butter and white wine. It's lovely. Or, actually, the really great San Francisco thing is with these amazing Vietnamese garlic noodles, which just go perfect with the crab. But it's a longstanding tradition that goes back to the 1800s because this is when the crab season was. So, there were just a lot of crab right around now.
Taylor Wilson:
Wow. So, let's go to the other side of the country and talk about Florida where it's peak citrus season this time of year. Beth, what's the importance of some of these fruits around this month?
Elizabeth Weise:
You think, "Oh, it's all commercial. This is all just made up by ad people." But actually, it really goes back to the harvest season. In Florida, I mean, Florida's been a big citrus state since the 1800s. December is peak harvest time for citrus, especially oranges, because that was the original main crop. And then, in the 1860s was when we first started to get refrigerated ... I mean, they refrigerated, they just stuck blocks of ice in trains so that they could transport the oranges further without having them go bad. And so, that meant that in New York, in the Northeast, the big population centers, you could get a fresh orange, which was, think of it back then, that was a crazy thing to have a fresh orange in New England at Christmastime. But they weren't so hideously expensive that you couldn't have one.
And it was common to put them in kids' stockings for Christmas. And there's some people who say it goes back ... There's a legend about Saint Nicholas that there was a poor man who had three daughters and he couldn't pay dowries to marry them, so he was going to have to sell them into slavery. And Saint Nicholas walked by and threw gold through his window, and it landed in his stocking. And he had enough money so that his daughters could be happily married as opposed to being sold into slavery. And so, that's the miracle of the dowries.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, let's step over to the Southwest, Beth, in New Mexico where there's a very different food tradition there. What can you tell us?
Elizabeth Weise:
And again, this is a harvest tradition. So, it's really all about what floods the market at this time. And in New Mexico, which the Hatch Valley, there is a major producer of New Mexican chilies. This is just when the big, red, New Mexican chilies are being harvested, you can pull them green and cook them and eat them. But normally, what you do is you take them, you split them open and you let them dry, and then you grind them up into a powder, and that's chili powder. And then you can make enchilada sauce and salsa and things out of them.
And so, just at this time of year, you would see these strings of drying red peppers, and they're beautiful. I mean, I've seen them and they're just lovely. They're called ristras, which means string in Spanish. Because they happen right around the holiday season they've become kind of a merging into a Christmas tradition, but also a hospitality thing. And so, people will hang them on either side of their doorway. People make wreaths out of them, which are quite lovely. And they're hard, they're not impossible, but they're pretty hard to ship because they're delicate, so you don't see them really as much outside of New Mexico. And the one thing I learned is that, so in New Mexico, they have a state question, which is, "Red or green?" Which I did not know. And it's, "Do you want red or green salsa on your enchiladas?" And it turns out that it's a legal question. They put it in law there. If you want both, you say, "Christmas," because it's red and green together.
Taylor Wilson:
Love that. Elizabeth Weise is a national correspondent with Paste BN. Thank you, Beth.
Elizabeth Weise:
As always, a pleasure.
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Taylor Wilson:
Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. We're produced by Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan, and our executive producer is Laura Beatty. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for the Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from Paste BN.