President Trump commuted the sentence of John “Johnny Doc” Dougherty, a former union business manager, his lawyer announced.
“President Trump has signed a commutation so that Johnny Doc can be released from prison to take care of his gravely ill wife, Cecilia Dougherty,” lawyer George Bochetto said in a statement shared by CBS News. “Cecilia Dougherty is in desperate need of care. Her money has run out for private nursing, and she desperately needs John by her side. And that’s why now.”
“We’re going to have a crew there to receive John and bring him to his wife,” Bochetto said.
The lawyer added that he received the phone call informing him of the commutation on Thursday. “We are all just so grateful to President Trump, who really has risen above politics. John Dougherty is an icon of Democratic politics in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. Donald Trump is a Republican,” he told the outlet. “The president has risen above partisan politics and recognized the need and the compassion that this case presented and commuted John’s sentence so he can return home and take care of his wife.”
He similarly told NBC10 that “Dougherty was a powerful Democratic politician working for Democrats in Democratic elections across the board, and for a Republican president to step up and grant this kind of compassionate release, I think really says a lot about the man.”
Dougherty was sentenced to six years in prison in 2024 for “crimes arising from his embezzlement of funds belonging to Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and multiple crimes involving his payment of bribes to codefendant Robert Henon,” the Department of Justice explained at the time. He embezzled more than $600,000 from Local 98 between 2010 and 2016.
