WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Sunday posthumously pardoned Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who influenced Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders and was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s. Also receiving pardons were a top Virginia lawmaker and advocates for immigrant rights, criminal justice reform and gun violence prevention.

Congressional leaders had pushed for Biden to pardon Garvey, with supporters arguing that Garvey’s conviction was politically motivated and an effort to silence the increasingly popular leader who spoke of racial pride. After Garvey was convicted, he was deported to Jamaica, where he was born. He died in 1940.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said of Garvey: “He was the first man, on a mass scale and level” to give millions of Black people “a sense of dignity and destiny.”

It’s not clear whether Biden, who leaves office Monday, will pardons people who have been criticized or threatened by President-elect Donald Trump.

Issuing preemptive pardons — for actual or imagined offenses by Trump’s critics that could be investigated or prosecuted by the incoming administration — would stretch the powers of the presidency in untested ways.

Biden has set the presidential record for most individual pardons and commutations issued. He announced on Friday that he was commuting the sentences of almost 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. He also gave a broad pardon for his son Hunter, who was prosecuted for gun and tax crimes.

The president has announced he was commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, converting their punishments to life imprisonment just as Trump, an outspoken proponent of expanding capital punishment, takes office. In his first term, Trump presided over an unprecedented number of executions, 13, in a protracted timeline during the coronavirus pandemic.

A pardon relieves a person of guilt and punishment. A commutation reduces or eliminates the punishment but doesn’t exonerate the wrongdoing.

Among those pardoned on Sunday were:

— Don Scott, who is the speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates in a chamber narrowly controlled by Democrats. He was convicted of a drug offense in 1994 and served eight years in prison. He was elected to the Virginia legislature in 2019, and later became the first Black speaker.

“I am deeply humbled to share that I have received a Presidential Pardon from President Joe Biden for a mistake I made in 1994 — one that changed the course of my life and taught me the true power of redemption,” Scott said in a statement.

—Immigrant rights activist Ravi Ragbir, who was convicted of a nonviolent offence in 2001 and was sentenced to two years in prison and was facing deportation to Trinidad and Tobago.

—Kemba Smith Pradia, who was convicted of a drug offense in 1994 and sentenced to 24 years behind bars. She has since become a prison reform activist. President Bill Clinton commuted her sentence in 2000.

—Darryl Chambers of Wilmington, Delaware, a gun violence prevention advocate who was convicted of a drug offense and sentenced to 17 years in prison. He studies and writes about gun violence prevention.

Biden commuted the sentences of two people:

—Michelle West, who was serving life in prison for her role in a drug conspiracy case in the early 1990s. West has a daughter who has written publicly about the struggle of growing up with a mother behind bars.

—Robin Peoples, who was convicted of robbing banks in northwest Indiana in the late 1990s and was sentenced to 111 years in prison. The White House said in a statement that Peoples would have faced significantly lower sentences today under current laws.

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Associated Press writer Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report.

MOSCOW — A Russian-born U.S. citizen already imprisoned in Russia on a bribery conviction has been handed a second 15-year jail term for espionage, Russian news agencies reported Tuesday.

A Moscow court brought espionage charges against Gene Spector in August 2023, although details surrounding the case were not made public.

Spector, formerly an executive at a medical equipment company in Russia, was previously sentenced to 3.5 years in prison in September 2022 for enabling bribes to an aide of former Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich. The aide, Anastasia Alekseyeva, was sentenced to 12 years in April for taking bribes of two expensive overseas vacation trips.

Dvorkovich was a deputy prime minister under Dmitry Medvedev in 2012-2018. He is currently head of the international chess federation FIDE.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A man from Memphis, Tennessee has been found guilty by a judge in Fiji of murdering his wife during their honeymoon in 2022, the prosecutor’s office said Monday.

Bradley Robert Dawson, 40, killed his wife, Christe Chen, who was 36, at the exclusive Turtle Island resort in the Yasawa archipelago two days after the newlyweds arrived in Fiji, then fled by kayak to a nearby island. Chen was discovered in the couple’s room by resort staff with multiple blunt trauma wounds to her head after the couple was heard arguing and did not appear at breakfast or lunch the next day.

Justice Riyaz Hamza found Dawson guilty in the Lautoka High Court last Thursday after a weeklong trial, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions said. Dawson had defended the charge.

The fact that Dawson was carrying his passport and other belongings with him when he was arrested indicated that he planned to flee, Hamza said, according to the Fiji Times newspaper. The judge said he was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Dawson and no one else had committed the offense.

The U.S. national, who remains in custody in Fiji, faces a mandatory term of life in prison when he is sentenced in January. Fiji law permits a presiding judge to set a minimum term to be served before a pardon is considered.

An attorney for Dawson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In 2022, a lawyer representing Christe Chen’s parents said their daughter’s body was so badly damaged that she could not be embalmed for return to the U.S. and her remains were cremated. Chen worked as a pastry chef before returning to school to become a pharmacist, and had worked in that capacity at a Kroger supermarket in Memphis.

The family’s lawyer, Ronald Gordon — who did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday — said Chen and Dawson were heard arguing over dinner the night before the murder.

Dawson worked in the information technology department at Youth Villages, a nonprofit child welfare and support organization based in Memphis, the organization confirmed when he was arrested. An online records search showed no criminal arrests for Dawson in Shelby County, which includes Memphis.

The Turtle Island resort, where the pair stayed, is an exclusive and remote 500-acre island that accommodates only 14 couples at a time. Yasawa is a group of about 20 volcanic islands in the west of Fiji, an idyllic South Pacific island nation of 930,000 people.