Recently in Clemency Category

Kentucky Pardons

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The worst abuses of the pardon power generally occur in the "lame duck" period between the election and the change of officeholders. Hans Bader has this commentary at CNS News. "In his last days in office, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin pardoned some of Kentucky's worst murderers. Among those he released from prison was a convicted killer whose brother was a big campaign donor."

Liberals Discover Problems with Clemency

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For years on this blog, I have campaigned against scattershot clemency for federal felons. While there is without doubt a place for clemency, and the Framers were wise to make it available to the Executive Branch, it can also be abused  --  as my liberal critics suddenly discovered over the weekend.  This was after years of their telling us that America needs to be a land of mercy and second chances, that we're too quick to look to punishment rather than understanding, there's an inherent political influence in prosecution and sentencing, and that older people in particular are good bets to remain in (or to be returned to) the community, because they're unlikely to re-offend and, well, simply because it's inhumane to incarcerate the elderly.

If anyone heard liberals repeat a single word of this years-long refrain in connection with Sheriff Joe, please quote it and link to it.  I sure haven't.

Pardoning Sheriff Joe

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President Trump pardoned former Sheriff Joe Arpaio Friday, as he hinted he would at the earlier rally in Phoenix.  Arpaio was the Sheriff of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix.  Shane Harris has this article in the WSJ on the divided reaction within the Republican Party.  The WSJ also has this editorial on the negative side of the reaction.

Where Are They Now?

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President Obama commuted more sentences than his 12 predecessors combined. The total was more than 1700.  The idea  --  one that we heard repeatedly  -- was that they would return to their communities to become productive, tax-paying citizens.

Someone didn't get the memo,

A convicted cocaine dealer released from prison early by former President Barack Obama is going to be an inmate again after getting arrested for theft and violating the terms of her release.

Carol Denise Richardson, 49, was arrested by the Pasadena (Texas) Police Department on April 13, less than a year after her life sentence for cocaine trafficking was cut short. She was placed on supervised release for ten years and the arrest and probation violations, such as quitting her job, will send her back to federal prison for 14 months.

In a Thursday hearing, assistant U.S. Attorney Ted Imperato said, "This defendant was literally given a second chance to become a productive member of society and has wasted it. She has shown a willful disregard for the law and must face the consequences for her crime."

Obama commuted a record amount of convicts, 1,715, and Richardson is at least the second of the bunch to have been arrested after their release. Robert M. Gill, another drug dealer, was arrested with two pounds of cocaine more than a year after his release, according to the New York Post.

With a sky-high recidivism rate for drug offenders (a rate Obama kept out of sight while on his clemency binge in favor of Happy Face statements he knew would never get pinned to him), what were we expecting?

Paul Larkin has this essay in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, which is affiliated with the Federalist Society.  He believes that having the Office of the Pardon Attorney in the Department of Justice creates a conflict of interest.  But where else to put it?

Paul suggests that the Vice President should be in charge of pardons.  He would, of course, need a staff or a board to advise him, but the Veep would make the short walk to the Oval Office with his recommendations on who among the many applicants would actually get clemency.

I worked with Paul many years ago and have always respected his work.  His idea is worth considering.
President Obama issued more sentence commutations than his twelve predecessors combined.  It might be the case, of course, that Mr. Obama is more far-sighted and humane than essentially everyone who sat in the Oval Office since WWII.  Or it might be that Obama's political constituency is more heavily invested in the notion that America is a brutal and racist country that needs a slap in the face to come to terms with its wretchedness.

A tip-off as to which of these is more likely to be the driver might be found in the fact that Obama began his clemency binge in earnest only after November 2014  -- at which point he would no longer be facing an election where voters beyond his constituency could deliver their judgment. 

But one way or the other, you can almost hear the other shoe not dropping.  That is, where is the media's curiosity about what the drug pushers given clemency are doing with it?  We were told their prison records and rehabilitation showed they would routinely become productive family men, good citizens and taxpayers.  It shouldn't be that hard to find out.  Why isn't anyone asking?

You Go Back, Jack, Do It Again

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Guillermo Contreras reports for the San Antonio Express-News:

Robert Gill, whose life sentence for cocaine and heroin distribution conspiracy was commuted by President Barack Obama and expired in 2015, was back before a federal magistrate on another drug charge.
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Gill is charged by Homeland Security Investigations with possession with intent to distribute 500 grams or more of cocaine. He faces 5 to 40 years in prison now.
That's the steely reality of clemency.

Treason? Not a Problem!

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Among the most astonishing and damaging security breaches in decades took place when then-Sergeant Bradley Manning (who now calls himself/herself "Chelsea") released massive amounts of classified national security information to Wikileaks. But, hey, we gotta have second chances!  Thus, the Hill reports:

President Obama on Tuesday commuted the prison sentence of former Army soldier Chelsea Manning, according to the White House. 

Manning was convicted in 2013 of leaking classified information about U.S. national security activities that were later disclosed by WikiLeaks.  The 35-year sentence Manning received was the longest ever imposed for a leak conviction. Manning has already served seven years of her sentence and will now be released on May 17, 2017. 

She was originally set to be released be released in 2045. 

Yup, getting your sentence chopped by 80% for grossly compromising national security while you're serving in the armed forces is just what the doctor ordered.

By any sane reckoning, this is a scandal that exponentially dwarfs the Marc Rich affair.  No wonder Obama waited until about 70 hours before he exits the White House.

UPDATE:  I was quoted on this commutation in the up-to-the-minute journal, Lifezette, here.



President Obama continues his reckless and ideologically-driven course of handing out commutations in record numbers.  Just this year, he's handed out 688 of them, dozens to inmates with firearms as well as hard drug convictions.  This is from the same President who says he's worried about "gun violence."  Apparently, he's most worried about it when guns are in the hands of normal, law-abiding people, less so when they're in the hands of felons who've been packin' heat to their 2 a.m. drug deals.

The commutation story is covered by Brendan Kirby in a relatively new and very worthwhile online publication, Lifezette.  The article is here; it quotes me a few times.

When it could no longer be hidden that murder and heroin overdose deaths have been spiking for (now) close to two years, the once-sanguine Congressional prospects for "sentencing reform," i.e., sentencing reduction, took a nosedive.  The President saw this, and did what he so often does:  He just walked past the reasons for Congress's wise caution and used unilateral executive power, knowing he would never again have to face the electorate.

If you think Bill Clinton's disgraceful midnight pardons were a doozie, you're right. But I strongly suspect you ain't seen nothin' yet.
The Wall Street Journal explains that Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia has thumbed his nose at an order of the highest court in the state in the name of giving an en masse benefit to felons:

President Obama has charted new levels of executive defiance, but even he hasn't refused to obey a Supreme Court ruling. Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe has sought to follow Mr. Obama's executive hubris, and now he's gone further and is acting in contempt of the court that has rebuked him.

In July the Virginia Supreme Court struck down his executive order restoring voting rights to 206,000 felons. Under Virginia law the Governor can grant clemency on an individual basis. But the justices wrote that "Governor McAuliffe's assertion of 'absolute' power to issue his executive order" runs "afoul of the separation-of-powers principle" in the Virginia constitution. The individual clemency power, the court admonished, "does not mean he can effectively rewrite the general rule of law."

Mr. McAuliffe replied that he "cannot accept" the ruling...He has since acted on his defiance by restoring rights to some 13,000 felons who had already registered to vote when the state Supreme Court's decision invalidated his executive order.


If anyone on the Left has denounced McAuliffe for his open defiance of the rule of law, I haven't heard about it. But being pro-criminal in Leftist culture means never having to say you're sorry, court order or no court order.



I'm having trouble recalling the exact date, but it was around 1998 when President Dole announced that, in view of the tidal wave of crime against which the country had made decent, but still insufficient, progress, he was proud to announce that his administration had secured more prison terms exceeding 20 years than his nine predecessors combined.  Mr. Dole acknowledged that so many long sentences might be viewed by some as extremism.  His reply was that, given the burdens the threat of ubiquitous crime impose on the practical liberty of our citizens, "extremism in the defense of liberty was no vice."

The New York Times was having none of it.  Its editorial was unambiguous:

We had thought that breast-beating exhortations like "extremism in the defense of liberty" had seen their last when Barry Goldwater's landslide loss put extremism in the cold light of a sober nation's reflection.  

It is true that crime had risen to unacceptable levels during the George H.W. Bush Administration, but we have made six years of progress in scaling it back without President Dole's resort to criminal justice extremism.  

A balanced and mature approach to justice requires that a President show at least a modicum of respect to a consensus that has lasted for more than 50 years, through prior administrations and political climates of all stripes. When, to the contrary, a chief executive's sentencing outcomes push past those of his nine predecessors combined, he has simply gone off the deep end, there's no other honest way to put it. This is not a defense of liberty. It's a defense of the President's out-of-the-mainstream ideas, a sop to the most extreme elements of his base, and it has to stop.


President Obama and those taking the side of the criminal continue to be delighted with the more than 200 commutations handed out Wednesday.  The sheer number produces glee; the White House proudly points out that it's the most granted in a single day since at least 1900.

But not everyone is on the radical pro-criminal side.  Bob Goodlatte, Chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, tends toward a more sensible view.  Goodlatte favors some aspects of sentencing reform  --  and his support will be essential should the reform movement revive itself in the next Congress  --  but he's no one's version of an extremist.  And he's more than a little concerned about both the number of clemencies and the broad-brush approach the Left has taken toward using the clemency power. Hence, as noted in this news report from Goodlatte's congressional district:

Rep. Bob Goodlatte said he is "deeply concerned" about the size and scope of those commutations -- including the 214 approved Wednesday -- saying the president's actions are a "blatant usurpation" of Congress's authority....


Answer:  When Barack Obama is handing out clemency to drug felons.  If they were packin' heat on the street corner, well, look, boys will be boys.  

The important thing is to shimmy down the prison population.  If the federal recidivism rate is half (49.3%, exactly), and crime across America is skyrocketing, please, get over it.  We need to "rebuild our communities"  --  with drug pushers.

Heather MacDonald lays it out in her telling piece in the National Review.

President Barack Obama commuted the sentences of 214 federal prisoners yesterday, part of his ongoing crusade against a criminal-justice system he regularly declares racist and draconian. The White House trumpeted the fact that this was the largest one-day grant of clemency since 1900....

Many of the commuttees possessed stolen firearms or firearms with their serial numbers obliterated. Some were in violation of National Firearms Registration, which can mean possession of a federally prohibited weapon, such as a machine gun, silencer, or sawed-off shotgun. We don't know how many guns the offenders actually had; a commuttee during a previous batch of commutations had 40. 

Nor does the Justice Department's press release disclose the actual incidence of firearm possession by these federal convicts. Gun possession can be used to increase a federal sentence under the federal sentencing guidelines without a prosecutor's actually bringing a formal charge. A gun charge can also be plea-bargained away. Many advocates of criminal-justice reform believe in maximum gun control, yet White House press releases on the president's commutations have been silent on the widespread incidence of illegal gun possession.


The Jailbreak Accelerates

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President Obama is often accused by conservatives of being a failure.  I respectfully dissent. The President is actually a remarkable success  --  at what he wants to do.  

One of those things is abrogate hundreds, if not in the end thousands, of legal sentences for trafficking very dangerous drugs.  Hence today's latest installment of the mass jailbreak:

President Obama commuted the sentences of 214 people serving federal sentences on Wednesday -- the most commutations issued by a president in a single day since at least 1900 -- White House officials told BuzzFeed News.

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Including Wednesday's commutations, Obama has granted a total of 562 commutations -- a number that the White House says is more than the previous nine presidents combined but that has been questioned by some advocates...

Now, when a President commutes more sentences than his nine predecessors combined  --  that would be going back more than 50 years  --  some might say that this reflects an extremist view of clemency. But no!  Barack Obama is the only one marching in step!  Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush II were all out of step.

Now I understand.


Kent wrote here about Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe's blanket order restoring the voting rights of about 200,000 felons in that state.  This afternoon, the Virginia Supreme Court nullified McAuliffe's order.

Full participation in democracy is, in the abstract, a good thing.  And doing what we can to bring back into the system felons who understand the wrongfulness of their behavior and have corrected it is part of that.  Restoring the vote for those who continue to believe (and, often, to act) as if law is for other people, and rules are for suckers, is a different matter. That would certainly seem to be more an abuse than a use of this aspect of executive power.

At the end of the story linked above, Gov. McAuliffe is reported to have said he would effectively defy any court order contrary to his liking:  "I will sign 206,000 orders. They will have their rights back that day."

He is welcome to proceed, as far as I'm concerned.  Signing 206,000 orders in a day will obviously reflect exactly the mass "consideration" the Court forbade today, and thus will earn McAuliffe a contempt citation.

UPDATE:  As the first commenter points out, I failed correctly to link the WTOP story.  I apologize for this error, which I have rectified.  That said, the story states, as I quoted, "I will sign 206,000 orders. They will have their rights back that day."  In other words, it makes crystal  clear that McAuliffe intends to attempt to do by poorly disguised indirection what the Court has forbidden, to wit, grant a mass  pardon.

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