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

Article Summary

Pardonned.com is a public-interest tracker documenting all presidential pardons and commutations granted by living US presidents since Bill Clinton, covering 3,205 clemency grants sourced directly from DOJ Office of the Pardon Attorney warrant documents. Users can search and filter individual pardons while viewing aggregate statistics on prison time reduced, fines abandoned, and restitution forgiven across administrations. The project was inspired by Liz Oyer’s videos and built with Playwright for scraping, SQLite for storage, and Astro 6 for generating a static site — all open source.

Discussion

• Multiple commenters noted the irony that “public record” and “actually accessible” are very different things — the DOJ website should have offered this natively, and the need to build it highlights how inaccessible government data truly is.
• Discussion around Trump’s broad pardons surfaced quickly, including a noted case of repeat pardons (Adriana Camberos pardoned twice), and debate over whether preemptive or blanket pardons should be constitutional at all.
• Users suggested feature additions: demographic breakdowns (race, age), financial data (donor connections), and per-president analysis of offense types — one commenter noted Obama’s high count was almost entirely drug offenses.
• A commenter flagged a potential data quality issue: a pardon for “Distribution of satellite cable television decryption devices” was miscategorized as a drug offense, raising questions about the automated classification.
• The site’s clean data structure drew praise from developers — one user noted they could trivially extract the full dataset from a single page load, and suggested it would fit well on Our World in Data for cross-country visualization.

Discuss on HN