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President Biden pardons 77-year-old man for illegal whiskey sale

05 January 2023 By Louis Thomas

Among those pardoned in President Joe Biden’s Clemency Recipient List was Charlie Byrnes Jackson, who was convicted almost 60 years ago for a single instance of selling whiskey without a tax stamp.

Jackson, from Swansea, South Carolina, was 18 at the time of the offence in 1964 which, in the words of the White House’s statement on the pardon: “resulted in nominal loss to the government”.

In the mid-1960s, after graduating from high school, Jackson attempted to fulfil a long-held dream and enlist in the US Marines. However, due to his federal conviction, he was rejected. In 1969 he completed his five years of probation and the list notes that he has been an active member of his local church since 1987, using his carpentry skills to renovate and restore the building.

Of the other five individuals on the list, four were pardoned for drug-related offences and another, an 80-year-old woman, for killing her abusive husband when she was 33.

Biden is not the first president to have pardoned someone over a whiskey tax-related misdemeanour. After the so-called ‘Whiskey Rebellion’ of the 1790s, a violent protest in Pennsylvania against the tax on domestically-produced distilled spirits (the first such tax imposed by the newly-formed US Government) which was eventually crushed by the US Army, President George Washington pardoned several of the rebels. In turn, almost a century and a half later, Franklin D. Roosevelt would pardon numerous individuals who had been convicted of bootlegging during Prohibition.

While Jackson’s story shows how an illegal whiskey sale can cause problems down the line, a legal one can also turn out to be incriminating if the receipt is discovered in the wrong place, as one drug smuggler found out.