Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons

https://pardonned.com

Inspired by the videos of Liz Oyer, I wanted to be able to verify her claims and just look up all the pardons more easily.

Tech Stack: Playwright - to sccrape the DOJ website SQLite - local database Astro 6 - Build out a static website from the sqlite db

All code is open source and available on Github.

101 points | by vidluther 7 hours ago

12 comments

  • koolba 2 hours ago
    Are there any longer or more generic than this:

    > For any nonviolent offenses against the United States which they may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1 2014 through the date of this pardon (JAN 19, 2025).

    https://pardonned.com/pardon/details/biden-family/

    That’s 11+ years with no detail or description.

    • ceejayoz 56 minutes ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_Richard_Nixon

      https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-4311-...

      > Now, Therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.

      Not quite as long, but much more significant. (No violence exception, the criminal was the President, and they were crimes against the entire country, not some random drug/tax charges.)

      • gcanyon 3 minutes ago
        Ford did real damage that day.
    • vidluther 2 hours ago
      So this was the first time (i think) anyone got a preemptive pardon, the actual warrant on the DOJ website says what it says.. https://www.justice.gov/pardon/media/1385756/dl?inline

      Will have to crunch through the offenses in the db and see if anything else like this shows up.

      • lelandfe 1 hour ago
        Preemptive meaning they hadn't yet been convicted. Nixon was pardoned by Ford in this manner (for "all offenses against the United States" between Jan. 20, 1969—Aug. 9, 1974). Carter preemptively mass-pardoned draft dodgers, etc.
        • vidluther 1 hour ago
          I did not know that. Thanks for the lesson.
    • whoiskevin 50 minutes ago
      Look at what the Trump administration has done with the DOJ pursuing unwarranted indictments against anyone Trump doesn't like. All getting thrown out so far. And you lead with questioning why one of his constant targets would pardon his family? The bigger question is why this isn't more outrage at the GOP attempts to find something on Biden or Clinton. They have been wasting tax dollars while Coomer "investigates" for something that he has never been able to prove. I'd have pardoned everyone around me given that constant sustained and terrible attack. All the while the Trump grift machine continues without so much as a blink.
      • GorbachevyChase 10 minutes ago
        So two wrongs have made a right in this case? I think that you should not be emotionally invested in internet people impugning the honor of one crime family over another.
      • Jerrrrrrrry 38 minutes ago
        [dead]
  • siliconc0w 6 minutes ago
    We should at least ban the "preemptive" pardon if not all pardons. Pardon means forgiveness for a specific convicted crime, not a means to grant blanket immunity.
  • mpassman 28 minutes ago
    Nice. But why show Restitution Abandoned etc. if you have no way to calculate it?
    • vidluther 1 minute ago
      i am calculating it if it's available in the sentence details. If the sentence details don't have a fine or restitution then we can't calculate it.
  • kupadapuku 3 hours ago
    Love this idea - if I were to extend it, I'd add some kind of analysis breaking down the % composition of pardons (fraud vs drug offences vs financial crime) by President to see if there's some common trend. I was a little surprised to see the Obama number quite so high, until it became apparent that the vast majority were drug offenders being pardoned
    • justin66 38 minutes ago
      The Obama number is also high because the designer combined Obama's first and second terms into one figure, unlike what he did with the other presidents who served two terms.
    • vidluther 2 hours ago
      A bunch of mass commutations have occurred under Obama, Biden, and most recently under Trump, I'm working on a comparison tool, so we can visualize the change in number of pardons by president, further breakdown of composition is an interesting idea as well.
      • GorbachevyChase 6 minutes ago
        A more interesting analysis to me would not be the number pardoned, but rather the monetary value of correlated donations or direct financial interests. Pardons are one of the many services for sale, it seems.
    • nonameiguess 1 hour ago
      I'm pretty sure the numbers are going up simply because 1) 90s sentencing laws got insanely strict and prisons are full of old guys serving inflated sentences, 2) drug laws eventually became more lax and people are in prison for things that aren't even criminal any more, and 3) prisons have simply run out of space and it's easier to release people than build more.

      This kind of topic is bound to bring up a lot of outrage, but I'd invite people to remember it's the Marc Richs of the old buying pardons that you should be directing that toward. There are plenty of people locked up for a very long time who really don't deserve it. I recall a Chumash woman I worked with at the LA County Museum of Natural History 24 years ago. I gave her a ride home a few times and eventually realized I was taking her to a halfway house, and it came out that the FBI has busted her in the early 90s for criminal conspiracy and her only actual offense was refusing to testify against her husband, who'd been selling marijuana on their reservation under the logic that he didn't believe US law should apply because of the historical treaties about tribal land. She did 10 years in federal prison for that.

      • GorbachevyChase 1 minute ago
        Friend, I hope you do not actually believe that man was selling dope because of his nuanced political theories.
      • vidluther 1 hour ago
        @nonameiguess I agree on the pardon buying, the reason why I started looking into building this was because of a video by Liz Oyer, who pointed out all the restitution and fines that were being forgiven under Trump.

        That's kind of how I came upon the name for the site, I wanted to see if there is any truth to the rumors that people are selling and buying pardons. In order to investigate that, we needed a set of data to start from, in a manner that was easily queryable as opposed to what's on the DOJ website.

  • soumyaskartha 1 hour ago
    This kind of civic data should have been easily searchable for years. The fact that someone had to build it says a lot about how accessible government records actually are.
  • ks2048 3 hours ago
    Just yesterday, Trump said he's going to “pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval.” [1] Free reign for crimes for the next 2.5 years.

    Maybe removing this pardoning power could be a bipartisan goal... I guess we shouldn't hold our breath.

    [1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-promises-pardon-ev...

  • jsiepkes 3 hours ago
    > Pardons granted by Donald J. Trump (Second Term) Not Including the January 6th Pardons

    Why not include the January 6th pardons?

    • vidluther 2 hours ago
      That disclaimer is there for now to make it clear that we're not showing that data yet. I need to figure out how to show the mass commutations done by Biden as well.

      Working on a comparison tool, so we can see # of pardons over admins, it seems the number of pardons has been going up each administration.

  • andrewstuart 54 minutes ago
    Pardon power can serve no reasonable goal in a functioning democracy except to subvert justice.
    • fernmyth 41 minutes ago
      It’s an alternative to coups and civil wars. The deal made in private conversations is something like “Give up power peacefully. Everybody gets pardoned and goes home to their families. Nobody needs to do anything crazy or violent out of desperation to avoid prison.”
  • digdugdirk 2 hours ago
    Your numbers seem a bit off on the second Trump term. Trevor Milton was on the hook for over half a billion dollars of restitution alone.
    • vidluther 1 hour ago
      Thanks for the heads up on that.. there's a lot of massaging/cross checking that still needs to be done. Right now the numbers are based purely on what the sentence is described on the DOJ website.

      https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-grants-president-don...

      cmd-f trevor milton .. if the text for the sentence column doesn't say anything about a fine or restitution the system is not going to be able to figure that out.

      The numbers for the prison time reduced is also technically incorrect, Ross Ulbricht, Rod Blagojevich and many others had already served many years in prison, so technically we should not count that as time reduced.

  • takahitoyoneda 58 minutes ago
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  • dailoxxxx 5 hours ago
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  • emiliazar 7 hours ago
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