Bush Makes Stingy Use of Pardon Power
by TChris
President Bush has been miserly in the exercise of his pardon power.
Bush has issued 82 pardons and sentence commutations during 63 months in office, mainly to allow people who committed relatively minor offenses and served their sentences long ago to clear their names.
Only two of the 82 were sentence commutations, and they involved token reductions of time. The numbers include 11 pardons he granted yesterday. This one and this one and this one were for people who committed tax crimes in the 1980's. Tax crimes probably don't bother the president much. A more humane and productive use of the pardon power is illustrated in this post.
Margaret Colgate Love, who served as US Pardon Attorney under two administrations, has some advice for President Bush, courtesy of Sentencing Law and Policy:
It has been a long time since the federal pardon program was administered in a responsible way -- indeed since President Bush's father's tenure. One would have hoped that President Bush had learned from the fiasco at the end of the Clinton administration that a president ignores at his peril what President Reagan's White House Counsel Fred Fielding called "the housekeeping business of the presidency." If he were to initiate now a serious regime of pardoning, making 15 to 20 grants every couple of months and denying cases that are not meritorious, he could both arrive at the end of his term with a reasonable pardoning record and leave his successor a tidy room.
Maybe the president remembers all the angry Republicans when Clinton issued a round of pardons at the end of his presidency. Maybe he's saving his pardons for Scooter and Karl. More likely, he doesn't care that so many people are serving sentences disproportionate to their crime or character. Forgiveness is not one of the president's virtues.
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