WP: President Cautious In Issuing Pardons

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Bush Wasting Opportunity, Critics Say

With the stroke of a pen, President Bush last week bestowed forgiveness on four people who were long ago convicted of minor crimes, spent no time in prison and completed their probations.

The presidential pardons were holiday gifts that wiped away embarrassing and possibly career-crippling criminal records while restoring the civil rights of the four recipients. But some scholars of presidential pardons were less struck by Bush's show of mercy than by his reluctance to show it by granting clemency petitions more often and in more significant cases.

"He continues not to view his role as chief executive as one where he should temper the justice handed out by the justice system with mercy," said Douglas A. Berman, an Ohio State University law professor who studies presidential pardons. "This really is a stingy view of things, especially given how much larger our federal justice system is now" than it was in years past.

Bush has issued 31 clemency orders since becoming president. His father, George H.W. Bush, granted 77 during his one term as president -- which itself was hardly a prodigious pace. Franklin D. Roosevelt granted 3,687 clemency petitions during his four terms as president.

"What President Bush has done, to my personal way of thinking, is approach the use of his pardon power with no theory other than to stay safe," said Margaret Love, a Washington lawyer who served as federal pardon attorney, heading the government's screening of clemency petitions, between 1990 and 1997.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29991-2004Dec27.html