> the US government will let him serve his sentence in an Australian prison. It did seem logical that the US would try to offer the minimum assurances necessar

> the US government will let him serve his sentence in an Australian prison. It did seem logical that the US would try to offer the minimum assurances necessary to satisfy the British judges. One hypothetical that came to mind, though, was whether Biden could grant a pre-emptive commutation of his sentence. My understanding is that a president can issue a full pardon to someone who has not yet been indicted (let alone sentenced), but I'm not sure if there is a case of a president trying to commute a sentence that hasn't been issued yet. This would seem to allow various philosophical questions to arise, such as issuing a commutation of "half" the sentence, before discovering that the sentence issued is "life imprisonment". Also, what would happen if a president stated that the sentence should be reduced by 10 years, but the commutee only ended up being given an 8 year sentence? Would the government then owe the commutee compensation for 2 years of unlawful (albeit notional) imprisonment? Anyway, perhaps the best place to look for precedents here is a state governor pre-emptively granting a commutation of a death sentence to a defendant in a court case who had somehow won the sympathy of the public (possibly with an election coming up). I don't know if that has ever happened though.