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

280 points by vidluther 13 hours ago


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.

siliconc0w - 6 hours ago

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.

koolba - 8 hours ago

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.

lateforwork - 3 hours ago

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...

cs702 - 5 hours ago

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

jimkleiber - 2 hours ago

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.

DM70 - 13 minutes ago

May I ask you if your project does what nobody else does in USA?

spuz - an hour ago

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.

kupadapuku - 9 hours ago

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

millbj92 - 4 hours ago

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.

wavint - 2 hours ago

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.

ks2048 - 9 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...

xrd - 3 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.

- 5 hours ago
[deleted]
jsiepkes - 9 hours ago

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

Why not include the January 6th pardons?

soumyaskartha - 7 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 - 3 hours ago

Land of the free ( white collard criminals )

digdugdirk - 8 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.

hk1337 - 4 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 - 6 hours ago

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

shimman - 4 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.

fgkuescvricky - 2 hours ago

Have you created a linked data SPARQL endpoint?

vunderba - 3 hours ago

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

andrewstuart - 7 hours ago

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

Luki1234 - 4 hours ago

cool

insane_dreamer - 4 hours ago

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

takahitoyoneda - 7 hours ago

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devcraft_ai - 5 hours ago

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dailoxxxx - 11 hours ago

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emiliazar - 13 hours ago

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