JOE BIDEN’S PARDON FRENZY. With inaugural crowds gathering in Washington, D.C., the hours of Joe Biden‘s presidency are ticking down to noon Monday. Before that moment comes, though, Biden is expected to issue more pardons and commutations to go with the record number of clemencies, many of them controversial, that he has already granted.

Most notably, there was Biden’s breaking his promise not to pardon his son, Hunter. And then there were the commutations of the sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners, all killers and some of them multiple murderers, on federal death row. (The only three Biden showed no mercy were so politically unpalatable that Biden might have suffered politically for commuting their sentences.)