If you're not sorry to say goodbye to 2024 and its turbulent politics, you are far from alone.

New polling shows that Americans are feeling deeply fatigued.

To take a look back at this week's news and the political year, we turn to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart.

That's New York Times columnist David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart, Associate Editor for the Washington Post.

Gentlemen, thank you. A pleasure to be here with you. Let's start with the clemency by President

Biden earlier this week. He reverted the sentences and death row, 37 death row inmates. They

will now be serving life in prison. David, at one point, you were a defender of the death penalty.

How do you see this

particular clemency? Yeah, I was a supporter because I used to be a police reporter, and the

families of the victims that I covered wanted it. And I thought they should get the satisfaction

of the justice. But I've since become an opponent, in part because so many cases of wrongful

conviction. And there was a Texas Monthly story that showed that a case where somebody had been executed for a homicidal arson,

it was probably wrongly convicted. So I just thought we just don't know enough.

And so I'm glad President Biden did what he did about the ending of the death row.

I'm generally glad about the clemencies, though I think it was a little broad. There are some cases in there, one of the worst judicial scandals in Pennsylvania of a guy who took bribes from for-profit prisons and then

sentenced juveniles to earn revenue for those prisons. That was one of the worst scandals that he got

a clemency, which I don't think is deserved. But in general, I think Biden did the right thing.

Yep.

No, I agree. And the one thing people should understand is, particularly with President Biden pulling

people off death row, he did not set them free.

They are still in jail for life without the possibility of parole.

So it's still, they're still enduring a harsh sentence for the crimes they committed.

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