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

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.

This is the kind of data I would like to see on ourworldindata.org. They have good tools for visualising data and comparing between countries.

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.

Are you able to track repeat pardons of the same offender? If not you have a bug.

https://pardonned.com/pardon/details/adriana-isabel-camberos...

Adriana Camberos was in fact pardoned twice.

In 2021, convicted fraudster Adriana Camberos was freed from prison when President Trump commuted her sentence. Rather than taking advantage of that second chance, Ms. Camberos returned to crime. She was convicted again in 2024 in an unrelated fraud. In 2026, Mr. Trump pardoned her again.

Full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/us/politics/trump-fraudst...

I like the concept. I'd love to see more types of data available, especially maybe race, age, connection to the president or their families, donations that the pardoned/commuted people have given and to whom, and more.

I'd find that fascinating for seeing deeper patterns.

Thank you. Apologies in advance for nitpicking, but I think the correct spelling is "pardoned" (a quick search on Google confirms it).

Presidents shouldn't have the right to outright pardon people. It should have to go through some sort of body beforehand and be voted on like everything else.

This is exactly the kind of thing the DOJ website should have provided natively. Good reminder that "public record" and "actually accessible" are very different things. Bookmarked.

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...

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

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.

> Pardons granted by Donald J. Trump (Second Term) Not Including the January 6th Pardons

Why not include the January 6th pardons?

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.

Land of the free ( white collard criminals )

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

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.

Have you created a linked data SPARQL endpoint?

Nice. But why show Restitution Abandoned etc. if you have no way to calculate it?

Thanks for this. As engineers, I think it’s natural for us to look at things like executive orders and pardons, tools that seemingly have no real restrictions or caps, and immediately see them as open to exploitation by bad actors.

The pardon system in particular needs a serious overhaul. For every case where a pardon is used to correct an "unjust ruling", it swings just as easily in the opposite direction. Frankly I have more faith in a decision that goes through the proper judicial process than in one made unilaterally by a single person with zero oversight. There's a reason it's been historically called the "royal pardon".

We need a combination of:

- hard caps on the maximum number of pardons a president can issue per term

- congressional review before those pardons take effect

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.

Pardon power can serve no reasonable goal in a functioning democracy except to subvert justice.

cool

Presidential pardons should be banned, period. All presidential pardons are political in nature, and therefore not based on justice.

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