Clemency is a power that allows presidents to grant mercy, correct for excessive punishment, or bring an old conviction in line with changing times. Yet its potency lies in a controversial feature: at the federal level, it is a largely unlimited power granted to one person to use at their discretion.

The months before and after the January 2025 presidential transition were marked by an almost unprecedented and condensed exercise of the presidential pardon power. On Inauguration Day, President Trump issued pardons and commutations for rioters who stormed the United States Capitol in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Days later, he pardoned antiabortion protestors who obstructed access to reproductive health clinics and two police officers in Washington, DC, who were found by a federal jury to be responsible for the death of Karon Hylton-Brown and to have covered up the circumstances. Other recent recipients of Trump pardons have included an electric vehicle start-up founder (and major Trump donor) convicted of fraud and a former Tennessee state senator convicted of campaign fraud. Trump also fired the U.S. Department of Justice’s pardon attorney after she refused to recommend a restoration of gun rights to actor and Trump ally Mel Gibson.

The cascade of self-interested Trump pardons followed attention-grabbing pardons from President Biden before leaving office. These included a pardon for his son, Hunter Biden, for gun and tax convictions. There were also pardons for President Biden’s siblings and their spouses and for political allies; despite them not being charged with any crime, the move was meant to guard against threats of retribution made by Trump on the 2024 campaign trail. Like Trump’s pardons, these actions sparked widespread debate about the role and value of pardons. The controversy continued into March, when Trump claimed that many of Biden’s pardons may be “void” because of the former president’s alleged use of an autopen to sign them. (Legal scholars disputed Trump’s claim that pardons could be voided.)

This back-and-forth between Trump and Biden makes clemency appear to be a mere tool for appeasing a political base, settling a political score, or protecting political allies from anticipated attacks. But clemency is much more fundamental than that: it’s an instrument of mercy that can correct mistakes the legal system has made through a pardon (full exoneration), commutation (ending a sentence before completion), and respite (delaying a sentence). And it’s critical that both sides defend it as such.

Although Biden’s pardons of family and allies got most of the attention, his other actions demonstrate the crucial role clemency can play in addressing injustice. President Biden granted more acts of clemency than any president in history: a total of 4,245. He nearly emptied the federal death row, commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 people awaiting execution. He commuted the sentences of 1,500 people who had been safely transferred to home confinement under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act during Trump’s first term. (Senate Republicans had already tried sending them back to federal prison.) He also commuted the sentences of nearly 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses, the largest single-day act of clemency by a president, surpassing Obama’s clemency efforts in December 2016.

Mass incarceration may have crested, but millions are still being held in prisons and jails, many because of the failed policies of the past. Mandatory minimum sentences, “three-strikes” laws, and other practices have unnecessarily stranded thousands of people in prison. And the United States regularly hands down death sentences to people who are later exonerated (and sometimes executes them despite exculpatory evidence).

Clemency can help to extend justice and compassion to those harmed by failed policies and miscarriages of the legal system. It can provide a partial salve to the racial injustice that leads to Black Americans being incarcerated at five times the rate of their white neighbors (though more work must be done to expand racial justice in the clemency process). As Congress has failed to undo most of these harms through legislative reforms, clemency provides the president with the discretion to extend mercy to people who can be safely released from incarceration, an indispensable feature in a system that too often prizes punishment over safety and justice. The nonpartisan Office of the Pardon Attorney suffers from bureaucracy and a large backlog, but it remains a vitally underused tool for presidents to make acts of clemency more frequent and transparent and to deliver on its promise of mercy and second chances.

The American public recognizes this, and clemency enjoys enormous support. Sixty-eight percent of voters support ending or shortening prison sentences, and 82 percent think people convicted under laws that have since changed should have a chance to return home sooner.

But when presidents use clemency in a way that casts doubt on this narrative, they undermine the process. By issuing pardons only in the final days of their term, presidents suggest there is something risky or indefensible about clemency. And President Biden issued his mass commutations in the wake of controversial personal pardons, inviting an association between the two. Further, when one of the commutations under the CARES Act came under scrutiny, the administration passed up the opportunity to vocally defend the decision to commute the whole group rather than consider only individual cases.

For Trump’s part, he recently named Alice Marie Johnson, whom he pardoned during his first term, his “pardon czar.” Johnson, a Black woman, was imprisoned for more than 20 years on a nonviolent drug charge and has been an advocate for incarcerated people since her release. Establishing this position to improve the pardon process—and appointing someone with lived experience with the criminal legal system—is in and of itself laudable, but Trump’s prior acts of clemency cast doubt on this action. It is unclear how much sway Johnson will have over Trump, and “pardon czar” is an unofficial title. And showing mercy or rectifying systemic injustices contradicts Trump’s active agenda to expand the punitive powers of the legal system, arrest and detain political enemies, and relitigate progress made on police accountability and racial justice following the George Floyd protest movement of 2020.

But it’s also possible Johnson can present the president with a compelling case to release other people from prison. And if Trump grants clemency to more people like Johnson, whose arrest was the result of unjust and outdated laws that created massive racial disparities, that’s a good thing. Johnson’s freedom, the freedom of thousands of people to whom Biden granted clemency, and Trump’s justice-related pardons are worth celebrating. It is high time that both parties take clemency out of the shadows and celebrate it as well.