Pardon Me?

The dustup over the Scooter Libby semi-pardon sent me to do a bit of research into Presidential pardons. When it comes to pardons, both Bush Jr. and former President Clinton (whose pardon of Mark Rich is being compared with the Libby case) are pikers. Check out what a few Presidents have done, especially if you like your history served with a big dollop of wonkiness, on the blog run by Fortiusone, a company that combines “complex analysis of multiple data sources with intuitive, web-enabled visualization” (there’s apparently quite a demand for that). In fact there have been far more notorious pardons, many of them fairly recent: Patty Hearst, Jimmy Hoffa, George Steinbrenner (wow – I completely forgot about that one!) and the hugely controversial pardoning of Richard Nixon. Many of these pardons were about money or politics or both, which is probably what makes them noteworthy. One pardon you haven’t read about, because it hasn’t happened, involves a young high school star athlete from Douglasville, Georgia who at the age of seventeen had consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl and has now been in jail for two years of a ten-year sentence because of an archaic law that was changed after the fact and doesn’t apply retroactively. Seems like a good candidate for a pardon – except that neither money nor politics seem to be involved, only a human life.

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