by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
The Mississippi Supreme Court has upheld two-term Republican Gov. Haley Barbour’s pardons. This quintessential southern good old boy issued 203 of them in January on his last day in office, a hefty total for Mississippi. Barbour’s predecessor, Ronnie Musgrove, issued just one, to a fellow in the joint for a marijuana bust.
Under fierce attack, Barbour said 90 per cent of those involved had already been released from prison, some many years earlier and he’d acted in order to allow them to find employment, to get professional licenses, to vote, and – very important – to hunt. Of course many of the pardons went to well-off folk and those with political ties to the governor, which is only to be expected. A posthumous pardon went to Leon Turner, a prisoner who’d helped around the house when Barbour’s father, a Circuit Court judge, was sick, dying when Haley was two.
Barbour had political battles over pardons through his political career in Mississippi, some unedifying. This time he laid stress on Christian forgiveness and giving people a second chance, just like another Republican, Mike Huckabee (1033 pardons and commutations) did when quitting the governor’s mansion in Arkansas. Mitt Romney, I should say, didn’t issue a single pardon in his term as governor of Massachusetts which shows as clearly as his treatment of his dog what a blazing, ineffable asshole he is. Incidentally, they could do with more mercy in Mississippi which has the second highest rate of incarceration in the nation and a lopsided group of non-violent or drug offenders – 36 per cent compared to the national average of 20 per cent.
There’s something mythic about pardons, at least in the old days, when Robin Hood knelt to receive forgiveness from King Richard. These days the pardoning privilege as held by the president and by governors (some in conjunction with pardoning boards) always throws a usefully bright light on the operations of the political system, as with Bush Sr’s pardons of the Contra-gate conspirators, starting with Elliott Abrams; Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich; Bush Jr’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence.
A pardon instills very remote hope in the citizenry that the system can offer the tiniest chink of light, like an IRS amnesty. A pardon can mean a nullification (such as jurors have the power – rarely used, alas – to issue, this being the pardoner’s belief that the law is unjust and should be set aside); the reversal of a moral injustice or of a disproportionate punishment; or of a frank admission of the power of a really hefty bribe, as with Rich, or Bush’s Sr’s pardon of Armand Hammer.
There’s been a downward trend in nullification, or compassion or maybe bribery since Lyndon Johnson, who pardoned 1,187 across five years. Nixon ran him second with 926, including Jimmy Hoffa. Ford pardoned 409 including Nixon, Robert E. Lee and Tokyo Rose. Carter, on his second day in office issued unconditional amnesties to draft resisters and among others pardoned Jefferson Davis and Patty Hearst (commutation). He pardoned 566.
With Reagan, a two term president, the numbers dipped to 406, including George Steinbrenner and Mark Felt, the subject of an absorbing piece by John Dean on our site this weekend. George Bush Sr had a chill heart, beyond the mercy extended to Elliott Abrams and his old CIA buddies. He issued only 77 pardons in his single term. Across two terms Clinton bumped the number up to 459, including his brother Roger, Patty Hearst (full pardon), former CIA director John Deutch and 16 members of the Puerto Rican FALN. Bush Jr, as merciless as his father, pardoned 200 across two terms.
And Obama? Merciless too, as befits someone whose concern for personal survival and advantage are always paramount. So far as I can determine, by the end of 2011 he’d pardoned 22. The worst? George Washington, with 16. The most forgiving? FDR, with 3,687.
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