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The Biden administration has begun asking former inmates confined at home because of the pandemic to formally submit commutation applications, criminal justice reform advocates and one inmate herself tell POLITICO. Those who have been asked for the applications fall into a specific category: drug offenders released to home under the pandemic relief bill known as the CARES Act with four years or less on their sentences. Neither the White House nor the Department of Justice clarified how many individuals have been asked for commutation applications or whether it would be expanding the universe of those it reached out to beyond that subset. But it did confirm that the president was beginning to take action. (Stein, 9/13)

The Bureau of Prisons' website says that "the BOP has 7,569 inmates on home confinement. The total number of inmates placed in home confinement from March 26, 2020 to the present (including inmates who have completed service of their sentence) is 31,503." The Biden administration is calling on those 7,569 to submit clemency applications to have their sentences commuted to time served if the individuals have less than four years left on their sentences. (Hoffman and Carrega, 9/13)

A death row exoneree who lost more than a third of his life in prison because of a wrongful conviction has died of covid-19 just weeks shy of his nine-year exoneration anniversary. Damon Thibodeaux, the 142nd person to be freed from death row in the United States, died Aug. 31, according to an obituary in his hometown newspaper, the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate. Although Thibodeaux was the rare prisoner to be exonerated, his death places him among more than 660,000 individuals in the United States who have died of covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. (Bellware, 9/13)

An Arkansas doctor under investigation for prescribing an anti-parasite drug called ivermectin to jail detainees with COVID-19, even though federal health officials specifically warn against it, has said that those patients took the drug willingly. But several inmates at the Washington County jail say that is not the case — that they were given the pills with no indication of what they really were. CBS News spoke with 29-year-old Edrick Floreal-Wooten over a video call from the jail on Friday. After testing positive for COVID-19 in August, he said he and other inmates went to "pill call" and were given several pills with the explanation that it would help them "get better." He said he and others asked repeatedly what the pills were. (Cohen, 9/3)

The union that represents corrections officers in Pennsylvania prisons wants a state court to intervene over the governor’s recent mandate that they all get COVID-19 vaccines or submit to weekly testing. The six-page Commonwealth Court complaint over a rule Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf announced last month requests that the court issue a preliminary injunction to end mandatory testing unless inmates, visitors and outside vendors are also subject to the requirement. (Scolforo and Rubinkam, 9/13)

Arizona gets an F for its response to the COVID-19 pandemic in state prisons. That’s according to a recent nationwide review conducted by the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonpartisan advocacy group. Prison Policy Initiative spokesperson Wanda Bertram says they used 30 different metrics to grade prison systems, giving the most weight to what states did or did not do to reduce their prison populations. (Jenkins, 9/9)

The National Institutes of Health said it was reviewing the removal of genetic data about the Covid-19 virus from an agency-run archive after a scientist raised concerns about the episode earlier this summer. The data—a series of gene sequences from coronavirus samples obtained from Covid-19 patients in Wuhan in January and February 2020—could hold clues about the origin of the pandemic. The sequences were deleted from the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) last year at the request of one of the Wuhan University researchers who had originally provided them—a move that three Republican U.S. senators questioned in June in a sternly worded letter to NIH Director Francis Collins. (Marcus and Hinshaw, 9/13)

President Biden plans to call on global leaders to make new commitments to fight the coronavirus pandemic, including fully vaccinating 70 percent of the world’s population by next September, according to a list of targets obtained by The Washington Post. While many rich countries have reached or will soon reach that target, the rest of the world is very far behind. Roughly one-third of people globally are fully vaccinated, according to Our World In Data. Covax, the World Health Organization’s campaign to distribute vaccines to the world, said last week that "only 20% of people in low- and lower-middle-income countries have received a first dose of vaccine compared to 80% in high- and upper-middle income countries.” (Pietsch and Timsit, 9/14)