Should Hunter Biden go to prison? Jurors and former addicts say 'No'

WILMINGTON, Del. – Tyrone Mathis stood with his sunglasses perched atop his head near a drug abuse outreach van two blocks from where President Joe Biden’s son was convicted last week on narcotics-related gun charges, scanning the street for targets.

He called out as a younger woman in a tube top and leather shorts sauntered by, asking if she wanted a bottle of water. He ushered her over, nearly crushing an unlit cigarette she had dropped.

“Don’t step on it!” the woman warned before Mathis bent to retrieve the still-intact smoke. On his way up, he inquired quietly: Might she also need some naloxone – the magic bullet nasal spray that can reverse opioid overdoses. The client left with both – hydrated and armed against a possible fentanyl assault.

It was just another day of outreach after a week that saw the first family's struggle with drug use at the top of the national conversation.

More: President Biden says he won't commute son's sentence after conviction in gun case

Mathis, a former fire chief who is in substance use recovery, found himself wincing at news reports of Hunter Biden’s trial. Painful details of the younger Biden’s four-year struggle with crack cocaine spilled out of the courtroom and around the world.

“It was too much attention,” Mathis told the USA TODAY Network. Still, he added, “It lets everybody know that no one's immune from this. It has reached the White House – the biggest house in the United States of America.”

A president's son, a hard-hit state

Delaware is best known nationally as the Biden family's political citadel, a state that's legal home to more than two-thirds of corporations making up the Fortune 500. But Hunter Biden's trial made his birthplace a stand-in for the rest of the union: Delaware ranks fourth in overdose deaths per capita, ahead of hard-hit states like Louisiana, Maine and Kentucky.

Blocks from the courthouse in Wilmington where a federal jury found Hunter Biden guilty of lying about his addiction on a federal gun form in 2018 while buying a .38-cal. revolver, some of the jurors who voted to convict him wrangled over treatment, punishment and America's bottomless drug problem.

More: 'GUILTY': GOP both celebrates and downplays Hunter Biden verdict

The guilty verdict – the first criminal conviction of a sitting president’s child – followed five days of what prosecutors called “searingly honest” testimony about the 54-year-old’s crack cocaine habit. Prosecutors dredged up mountains of evidence of Biden’s drug use, imploding relationships and the “dangerous” decisions he made in the throes of addiction.

All the while, they insisted that he was only being punished for his decision to buy a gun.

Yet with daily reminders that people in recovery often consider themselves lifelong addicts or alcoholics, the trial also raised a key question: Can – and should – former users and their loved ones ever fully move on from the past?

As jurors deliberated last Monday afternoon and into Tuesday morning, they debated this very quandary. One member of the Biden panel, a 68-year-old who asked to be identified as Juror 10, told the USA TODAY Network he had acquaintances who'd struggled with addiction. “This is something that sticks with you for the rest of your life,” he said.

A different juror questioned why Hunter’s struggle had to become such a spectacle.

"I say fine him,” this juror said. “I don’t think anyone who is a non-violent drug addict should be in prison. Just fine him. We know he did something wrong. He needs help if he hasn’t gotten it yet.”

Hunter Biden has been in recovery since 2019, he and his lawyers have said.

More: Hunter Biden prosecution a 'waste of taxpayer dollars': Convicting jurors talk about historic trial

David Weiss, the Donald Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for Delaware and special counsel appointed in August 2023 to investigate “allegations of certain criminal conduct” by Hunter Biden, said he wasn't prosecuting a substance abuse problem. “This case was not just about addiction, a disease that haunts families across the United States,” Weiss said. “It was about the illegal choices the defendant made while in the throes of addiction…It was these choices and the combination of guns and drugs that made him dangerous.”

Hunter Biden’s addiction − and deeply private images from that time that were copied from his laptop by allies of former President Donald Trump − have made him a political target in the middle of a razor-thin presidential race. The internet is thick with memes showing the president’s son in a debased state. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, even displayed some of the images during a congressional hearing.

Now, he may face prison time, though U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika, a Trump appointee, hasn’t yet set a sentencing date. President Joe Biden has said he will neither pardon his son for the federal conviction, nor commute Hunter’s eventual sentence.

“Our courts have said addiction is not an excuse to get a lighter sentence,” researcher Maia Szalavitz, the author of several books on substance abuse disorder, told USA TODAY. “The prisons would be empty.”

More: Treatment or enforcement? Record fentanyl deaths spark new debate over war on drugs

Whether jail time would benefit the younger Biden or public safety is another question.

“In my opinion, someone who is showing a commitment to recovery, at a time like this, it could do more damage than good,” Travis, a 41-year-old recovering user at the Odyssey House treatment program in New York, said in an interview.

“One thing you see about Hunter Biden is how he has support from his family. From my own history of incarceration, it’s very difficult to be separated from that very important support during addiction and recovery,” the North Carolina native said.

“I don’t think it does any good for society.”

John Alexander Koch, a former substance user who now works in drug treatment in Phoenix, agreed.

"The goal is to get to people who are still suffering," he said. "Hunter Biden’s experience can help motivate them to find change and find peace in their lives.”

Isabel Hughes is a breaking news reporter who has covered the fentanyl crisis for Delaware's News Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network. Dan Morrison is USA TODAY's Deputy World editor.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Hunter Biden's trial showed 'no one's immune' to drug addiction