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I suspect that this was his original intent, but at some point in the process someone rushed into the room and said "sir, on Xitter they're saying that this means you're going to free [blah blah blah specific examples]", and he adjusted accordingly, but didn't see the ideological contradiction. Idiocy.
To be clear, even the explanation that it's about party-aligned ethnic groups, as @SteveKirk suggested doesn't get to a coherent set of principles. Let me introduce you to Kaboni Savage:
An infant and three other kids, presumably black, murdered over gangland bullshit.
No, the principle at play here seems to be whether the names involved were sufficiently well-known or not. There's no pattern to be found other than that, as near as I can tell. The commuted sentences include black, white, and Hispanic individuals. The victims denied justice are similarly broad across different ethnicities, across such identities as part-time postal workers, 12-year-old girls, the literal black baby mentioned in the above paragraph, and Russian immigrants targeted by their co-ethnic serial killers. The Boston bomber did not get a commute, which also puts a monkeywrench in the protection of aligned groups theory - it really does seem to be as simple keeping sentences if the public is actually familiar with the evils that were done.
Simple answer. Kabobi is black, so it doesn't count as a crime against blacks as a group
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