The president’s daughter says ‘We’re just getting started,’ but his campaign has offered no details
Alice Johnson’s appearance at the Republican National Convention last week was a rebuke to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who for decades promoted the draconian policies that sent her to prison for life as a first-time, nonviolent drug offender. Johnson’s case was also meant to show that President Donald Trump, who commuted her sentence in 2018 and pardoned her the day after her speech, offers a more enlightened alternative. The truth is a little more complicated. While Biden’s record on criminal justice issues is long and awful, Trump’s is short and pretty good. But when it comes to promises for the future, a repentant Biden supports several ambitious reforms, while Trump sounds like the Biden of the 1980s and ‘90s. Johnson, who received a life sentence in 1997 for participating in a Memphis-based cocaine trafficking operation, was introduced during the president’s State of the Union address last year, and she was featured in a Trump campaign Super Bowl ad last February. Her case exemplifies the unjust penalties that Biden — whom the Trump campaign describes, with only a little hyperbole, as “the chief architect of mass incarceration and the War on Drugs” — supported as a senator. Trump seems to have been genuinely moved by Johnson’s story, and so far he has commuted 10 sentences in addition to hers.
