The Unreported Irony of Hunter Biden’s Conviction
The ’S.O.B.’ with the felony rap was tripped up by Presidential Dad’s obsession with harsh gun and drug crime penalties
It has gone largely if not completely, unremarked in all the verbiage spun out by the 24-hour news cycle in the US media that the law under which the president’s son Hunter Biden was convicted on three felony counts, was something supported by his own dad, Joe Biden as part of his effort to “lock up drug users” for lengthy terms in 1994.
It’s no secret that Papa Biden, as a Senator and chair of the Senate Judicial Committee, teamed up with President Bill Clinton in a deliberate strategy of passing a get-tough-on-crime bill, undermining habeas corpus, making the death penalty tougher to appeal, and contriving to pile on years of jail time when offenses could be linked to one’s drug use in order to lock up low-level drug users and other perps — mostly non white — for serious time behind bars.. One such handy add-on was a law making it a crime to buy a gun while addicted to a Class A drug (but of course not while blitzed on alcohol).
In Hunter Biden’s case, his addiction to crack cocaine in and of itself would not likely have resulted in a felony conviction. Had been arrested or been proven to be in possession of under 10 grams of crack cocaine, he would have, as a first offender, typically have been put in a diversion program to undergo treatment and avoid jail. But because a “pile-on” charge of buying a gun while lying on the federal form required for such purchases, saying he was not a cocaine addict when he was in fact one, the case against him was raised to a Class A felony with a maximum 10-year sentence. And because the prosecutor added two related felony charges carrying a 10 and a five-year sentence, he faces at least the potential of 25 years in jail (thanks to a US judicial option, frequently used these days, of making sentences run consecutively instead of concurrently).
The idea behind the Biden-Clinton Drug laws of 1994 was decidedly not to help addicts go straight, or even to help reduce gun violence (there was no violence alleged in Biden’s case). It was to change the image of the Democratic Party from being soft on crime to one whose candidates would throw criminals and drug users and sellers in jail and toss away the key. In a Senate floor speech in 1994 as the Clinton crime bill he had shepherded through the Senate Judiciary Committee, was being put to a vote, Biden said, “Every time Richard Nixon, when he was running in 1972, would say, ‘Law and order,’ the Democratic match or response was, ‘Law and order with justice’ — whatever that meant. And I would say, ‘Lock the S.O.B.s up.’”
After passage of the legislation, Federal judges around the country happily obliged, mostly reserving the longest sentences for crimes committed by black offenders or other offenders of color. This led to the decades of mass incarceration whose victims still fill the nations prisons as state legislatures and state judges happily piled on,and to millions of people of color struggling to survive after release with felony records, following the draconian lock ‘em up approach of the Feds.
Now one of those “S.O.B.s “ Biden spoke of so cruelly is president’s own troubled and allegedly recovering crack-cocaine-addicted son Hunter. If Biden, worried about his re-election prospects, sticks with his vow not to use his pardon power to erase Hunter’s conviction or to commute it to parole of some kind, he will be the reason his son’s in the slammer.
It says a lot that Republican David Weiss, the special prosecutor appointed by Trump but who was kept on in that role by President Biden, specifically used the term “crack cocaine” multiple times in his indictment of Hunter Biden and and in his summation to the jury.
“Crack cocaine,” has long been the drug of choice of impoverished addicts, most often people of color, though it is also the drug used by poor whites because a smaller amount gives the same high making it much cheaper than cocaine powder. The people doing lines of strait cocaine are more typically lawyers, Wall Street traders, high-flying corporate executives Hollywood professionals and rock stars — people with the money to pay the higher prices. Under the Biden-Clinton drug laws, the penalties were often generally heavier for selling, buying or even using crack than for selling, buying or using cocaine. Recently those laws, at least at the federal level have been changed to equalize the charges and penalties, but many people in jail on drug charges involving crack are still serving lengthy sentences while cocaine convicts are long since out and are often back at their old jobs if they were even incarcerated at all. Weiss’s insidious use of the term crack-cocaine with reference to Biden was no accident; he was clearly trying to link defendant Biden with the sordid image of impoverished minority drug users.
That might seem like a story that most news organizations, whatever their political bent, would consider a significant irony to highlight, particularly given that Biden, struggling in the polls in his re-election campaign against former President Donald Trump, while defending his son as a “smart good person,” is not coming to his son’s aid beyond offering moral support.
And Weiss’s tactic seems to have worked on the jury. Despite Hunter having a top-flight legal team defending, the 12-member panel deliberated less than three hours before convicting him on all three felony counts, which together could (but likely won’t) lead to a sentence of 25 years if made to run consecutively.
But it’s important to note that for most black defendants facing the same case involving a gun and cocaine addiction, a long sentence would be quite likely, particularly because those defendants, especially in a state trial, would likely have their cases handled by some low-paid and overworked court-appointed public defender who would likely recommend a guilty plea in hopes of getting a lesser sentence — even if the charges were false.
The president, Hunter’s father, is clearly in a bind. He obviously loves his troubled younger son, but using his pardon power to let him off would highlight to already disenchanted black voters the familiar a double standard people of color face in US courtrooms. This is particularly true because the president has not followed through in any major way with a campaign promise to undo the horrors of the mass incarceration scheme he and President Clinton launched three decades ago — a scheme that over rthe decades has thrown hundreds of thousands of young black men and even children under 18 in in jail, and etched a big “F” for felon on their chests, ruining any chance for them to recover and led a productive live after finally getting out of prison or “juvie.”
The only place I’ve seen this hypocrisy and irony mentioned at all has been in a piece by Fox News which aired a few days after the conviction.
CNN on June 11 at least alluded to the irony in a piece headlined “Opinion: It doesn’t get more awkward than it did for Biden.” But that news story only told half the story, leavcing out the key point out that Biden, along with Clinton, was the key backer for ever-stricter gun laws like the ones his son has been convicted of violating.
It’s not a pretty picture, but Biden, rather astonishingly, made it worse by speaking out in favor of even tougher laws on guns the same day only a few hours after his son got the bad news from a unanimous jury: guilty-guilty-guilty.
Biden might have done better had he taken that awkward moment to show some empathy for those imprisoned by his draconian gun laws. He might have, instead of just saying, “I am the president but I’m also a dad,” have his concern for those hundreds of thousands of “SOBs” his 1994 crime law legislation has locked up (and for their families), and maybe acted to ease their pain with blanket pardons and cleared felony records. But he doesn’t seem to get it. None of those poor and minority inmates ever had a chance in the US Criminal Justice system Biden for so long oversaw and helped to make so unequal.
“I’m sorry” would have been better than what he offered.
No wonder Biden’s disapproval rating is so high, and odds-makers are saying Trump is likely to win in November.