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Posted by vidluther 14 hours ago

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.

280 points | 104 commentspage 2
ks2048 10 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...

amanaplanacanal 6 hours ago||
On the bright side, if they get pardoned they can't plead the fifth and can be forced to testify against anyone not pardoned.
technothrasher 6 hours ago||
Unfortunately, probably not. As they could simply invoke the fifth under the claim that they might incriminate themselves under some state law.
CobraMode 9 hours ago|||
As long as they can still pardon the turkey.
Lio 8 hours ago||
Pardon him for what? What is the charge here? Being a meal? Being a succulent Chinese meal?
winstonewert 8 hours ago|||
For anyone who might be confused about the pardoning a turkey reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Thanksgiving_Turkey_P...
DonHopkins 5 hours ago||
Or the succulent Chinese meal reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4bPMxeCnos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Manifest

draw_down 8 hours ago||
[dead]
xrd 4 hours ago||
Really terrific. Such fun to see overviews and then dig into the details to see how assumptions about each situation were inaccurate at first glance.
jsiepkes 10 hours ago||
> Pardons granted by Donald J. Trump (Second Term) Not Including the January 6th Pardons

Why not include the January 6th pardons?

vidluther 9 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.

soumyaskartha 8 hours 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.
dopidopHN2 4 hours ago||
Land of the free ( white collard criminals )
digdugdirk 9 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 9 hours 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.

hk1337 5 hours ago||
I would have thought a lot of the drug offense pardons by Obama would have been for marijuana but looking at the first few pages, they’re not.

> 118 of 2,791 GRANTS

Only 118 list marijuana in the pardon text

mpassman 7 hours ago||
Nice. But why show Restitution Abandoned etc. if you have no way to calculate it?
vidluther 7 hours 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.
elicash 5 hours ago||
Would love if you can track this more deeply and sort/filter/search through restitutions and fines. The ones you know about, that is.
shimman 5 hours ago|
Reminder that the pardon is a vestigial leftover from monarchism. The idea that one single person can go "nuh uh" in a democratic country is just another massive failure of the US constitution, a legal document written to suppress the will of the people and allow for minority rule but too sacrosanct to change for "reasons" that all seem to only benefit a small minority of people.

Relegate pardon powers to only amount to commutations, at the bare minimum.

Oh fun fact, Alexander Hamilton thought monarchies were the best form of government.

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