Thursday, June 07, 2007

To Pardon or Not to Pardon

Since the sentencing of Scooter Libby, there's been a lot of speculation about whether or not President Bush will pardon him.

Naturally, the nutroots are excited at the Libby sentence (see here for just one example of the nutroots insistence that Libby serve every single minute of his sentence).

I found this argument for commutation of the jail time in Libby's sentence to be persuasive.

Neither vindication of the rule of law nor any other aspect of the public interest requires that Libby go to prison. He is by no stretch a danger to the community, as "danger" is commonly understood. He did not commit his crime out of greed or personal malice. Nor is his life one that bespeaks a criminal turn of mind. To the contrary, as letters to the court on his behalf overwhelmingly established, he has been a contributor to his community and his country. And whether or not we agree, we cannot dismiss out of hand the notion that Libby thought he was serving his country by his overall conduct in this episode, specifically by letting it be known, truthfully, that it was not the White House that tapped Joseph Wilson to look into whether Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in Niger.

A sense of proportionality argues in favor of eliminating Libby's prison term. This was an unusually harsh sentence for a first offender convicted of a nonviolent and non-drug-related crime. Sandy Berger, national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, was not sentenced to prison for sneaking documents out of the National Archives, destroying them and then lying to investigators. For his actions, Berger received no jail time, a fine one-fifth of that imposed on Libby and 100 hours of community service.

To pardon Scooter Libby would not be consistent with the imperative that the mechanisms of law be able to demand, and receive, the truth. But to leave the sentence undisturbed would be an injustice to a person who, though guilty in this instance, is not what most people would, or should, think of as a criminal. Commutation offers a middle ground. Unlike a pardon, commuting the prison sentence would not erase the conviction. It would leave Libby with the disabilities of a convicted felon -- no small matter for a lawyer and public figure. But commutation would alleviate the harshest, and unnecessary, aspects of the sentence. A partial commutation would send the message that we insist on being truthful, but in the name of a justice that still cares about individual circumstances, we will not insist on being vindictive.

But don't hold your breath expecting President Bush to even commute the jail time. President Bush is pretty stingy where pardons are concerned.
In a January 2000 interview with reporter Jay Root of the Austin Star-Telegram, Governor Bush explained that his low number of pardons "comes not from political calculation but from pardoning Steven Raney in 1995 for a 1988 marijuana conviction. A few months after being absolved of his crime, the unpaid Ellis County constable was caught stealing cocaine from a drug bust. 'That caused a complete review of the process,' Bush said. 'I have nothing against pardoning. I just haven't been very aggressive on it. There's no philosophical reason. It's just that it kind of slowed us down initially. I said, `Whoa!' because it was a pretty rough story."

However, contrary to certain desperate moonbats, there's virtually no way President Bush will be either subpeonaed once he leaves office (for pardoning Libby) or be indicted for using his executive powers in ways unsatisfactory to liberals. There's never been an instance of this happening, and such would breech the executive privilege involved in performing his duties, particularly in a time of war. But don't expect that to stop the moonbats from being ever hopeful.