President Trump granted pardons to five former NFL players convicted of offenses ranging from counterfeiting to drug trafficking — a sweeping clemency action announced Thursday by White House clemency adviser Alice Marie Johnson.
The recipients: former Jets defensive lineman Joe Klecko, former Cowboys offensive lineman Nate Newton, former Ravens running back Jamal Lewis, former Bills running back Travis Henry, and the late Billy Cannon, a College Football Hall of Famer who played for the Houston Oilers, Oakland Raiders, and Kansas City Chiefs.
Each man had served time. Each had moved past his conviction. The pardons formalize what their post-prison lives already demonstrated — that a criminal record doesn't have to be the final word.
The five pardons span four decades of offenses and a wide range of severity, according to NewsMax.
Billy Cannon admitted in 1983 to participating in a counterfeiting scheme and served more than two years in prison. He died in 2018, making his pardon posthumous — a gesture that carries no legal consequence for the recipient but speaks to something beyond the transactional. Cannon was a two-time All-Pro and two-time Pro Bowl selection. His family now has a measure of restoration that prison time alone could never deliver.
Nate Newton, now 64, served 30 months in federal prison beginning in 2002 on a drug trafficking charge. Since his release, Newton has remained active in Dallas Cowboys team events and media appearances — a quiet reintegration that Jerry Jones apparently valued enough to personally deliver the pardon news. Johnson acknowledged that connection on social media:
"Special thanks to Jerry Jones for personally sharing the news with Nate Newton. I'm holding Nate's pardon in my hands today — what a blessed day."
Joe Klecko, inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2023, was sentenced to three months in prison for perjury in an insurance fraud case. Jamal Lewis — who won the Super Bowl with the Ravens in 2001 — pleaded guilty in 2004 to using a cellphone to facilitate a drug transaction. Travis Henry pleaded guilty in 2009 to conspiracy to traffic cocaine and served three years.
None of these men were angels at the time of their offenses. That's the entire point. Clemency isn't a reward for innocence — it's recognition that a debt has been paid and a life has moved forward.
There's a reason Alice Marie Johnson holds this portfolio. She served a life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense before Trump granted her clemency during his first term. She isn't issuing pardons from behind a policy desk — she's someone who knows what it feels like to wonder whether the system will ever let you be more than the worst thing you've done.
Johnson framed the announcement in language that connected football to the broader principle:
"As football reminds us, excellence is built on grit, grace, and the courage to rise again. So is our nation."
"Grateful to @POTUS for his continued commitment to second chances. Mercy changes lives."
She's right — and the fact that she's the one saying it makes it harder to dismiss. The left spent years demanding criminal justice reform as a vehicle for institutional critique, framing every pardon and commutation as a rebuke of "systemic" failure. Johnson's presence in this White House reframes the conversation around individual merit, personal transformation, and executive grace exercised case by case.
The presidential pardon power exists in the Constitution for a reason. It is not a loophole. It is not an oversight. It is a deliberate grant of authority that allows the executive to correct what rigid sentencing structures sometimes cannot — the gap between punishment served and justice done.
Trump issued 237 acts of clemency during his first term. For comparison, a Pew Research Center analysis found that Barack Obama granted 1,927 over two terms and Joe Biden granted 4,245 in a single term.
Those numbers from the Biden era deserve a moment of reflection. Biden's clemency spree — nearly twenty times Trump's first-term total — was largely characterized by mass commutations executed in bulk during his final stretch in office. Trump's approach has been more deliberate, more individual, more public. Each name gets announced. Each case gets explained. That's a fundamentally different philosophy: not clemency as political gesture, but clemency as personal recognition.
A pardon does not erase what happened. It does not rewrite history. What it does is remove the ongoing civil disabilities that follow a conviction — the boxes on job applications, the barriers to professional licensing, the permanent asterisk that makes reintegration harder than it needs to be. For men like Newton and Lewis, who already rebuilt their public lives, a pardon is the formal acknowledgment that the rebuilding counted.
For Billy Cannon's family, it's something else entirely — a posthumous clearing of a name that, despite the conviction, belonged to one of college football's most decorated players.
There's a version of criminal justice reform that conservatives have always understood better than the left gives them credit for. It doesn't require defunding police. It doesn't demand we pretend that crime isn't real or that consequences don't matter. It simply holds that once a person has served their time, demonstrated change, and contributed to their community, the system should have a mechanism to acknowledge that — and the president has the constitutional authority to do exactly that.
Five pardons. Five men who played at the highest level of professional football, fell hard, and — in four cases — lived to build something after the fall. The fifth gets his name back, even if he's not here to see it.
Mercy, it turns out, doesn't require a policy paper. It requires a pen and the judgment to use it.