A nonprofit leader who supports at-risk New Orleans youth. A social worker who fosters animals. A postdoctoral researcher.
They are among the roughly 1,540 people whose sentences were commuted or who were pardoned by President Joe Biden on Thursday in what was the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history.
But not everyone was pleased by Biden’s decisions. A Republican state senator said a commutation for a woman who stole $54 million from a small town in Illinois was “a slap in the face” to residents. The Democratic governor of Pennsylvania said Biden “got it absolutely wrong” when he commuted the sentence of a judge who orchestrated a scheme to send children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks.
Here are some of their stories:
TRYNITHA FULTON, 46, OF NEW ORLEANS