Bush Pardons 29, but Not Libby

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Forgiveness Follows Late-Term Tradition

President Bush granted pardons yesterday to carjackers, drug dealers, a moonshiner and a violator of election laws, but not to I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, his vice president's former top aide, who was convicted in the case of the leaked identity of a CIA operative.

Nearly all of those to win pardons this year were small-time crooks who at most were imprisoned for five years. Many never served time at all and instead were fined or put on probation.


In all, Bush pardoned 29 convicts and reduced the prison sentence of one more in the end-of-the-year presidential tradition.

Bush cut short the 1992 prison sentence of crack cocaine dealer Michael Dwayne Short of Hyattsville, who will be released Feb. 8 after serving 15 years of his 19-year sentence. Short's commutation comes the same day as the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted unanimously to allow about 19,500 federal prison inmates, most of them black, to seek reductions in crack cocaine sentences.

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First, it was the turkey. Now this?

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1. Margaret Colgate Love

who served as US Pardon Attorney for seven years, comments on the recent Bush pardons as follows:

"It has been more than a year since Bush issued any post-sentence pardons so it was encouraging to see a fairly substantial batch of cases this time -- though, as in the past, most of the offenses involved were dated and minor (car theft, moonshining, teller embezzlement, letter carrier mail theft, etc.). Most of the sentences involved probation and/or a fine, and the longest prison term was five years. While there are a few new law drug cases, the sentences suggest that they were very minor crimes indeed.

"Bush has now granted 142 pardons, which puts him on track to being the stingiest two-term president in U.S. history. While he may overtake his father in absolute number of grants by the end of his term, if you compare the number of cases available for consideration in each administration, the comparative compassion quotient is not even close. Ditto for his general housekeeping practices: there are now over 1000 pardon cases awaiting consideration, in addition to more than 3000 commutation cases, no applications in either category having been denied in over a year. Some applications (including those of a couple of my clients) have been awaiting consideration since the Clinton Administration. One can only hope that he picks up the pace in his final year or he will leave a frighteningly large backlog of cases for his successor.

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[StClone]

2. Next year Scooter.

That the way Bush work will work it, there will be a pile of Pardons.

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3. Bush Fraud Probes Jail Corporate Criminals Less Than Two Years

Sixty-one percent of defendants sentenced in the Bush administration's crackdown on corporate fraud spent no more than two years in jail, escaping the stiff penalties given WorldCom Inc. and Enron Corp. executives.

In the past five years, 28 percent of those sentenced got no prison time and 6 percent received 10 years or more, according to a review of 1,236 white-collar convictions. Former WorldCom Chief Executive Officer Bernard Ebbers is serving 25 years and ex-Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling 24.

``Sentencing white-collar defendants to two years or less does not send a strong deterrent message,'' says Joshua Hochberg, who ran the U.S. Justice Department's criminal fraud section from 1998 to 2005. ``On the other hand, convicting a lot of defendants sends the message that you will be caught and there are consequences.''

A wave of corporate corruption marked by Enron's collapse in 2001 and an accounting scandal at WorldCom led Congress to enact harsher penalties. President George W. Bush signed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to reform governance and named a Corporate Fraud Task Force to push ``significant'' prosecutions.

Lighter Sentences

Defendants got reduced jail time when they helped prosecutors investigate frauds, served as low- or mid-level executives, or committed crimes that were less sophisticated than complex accounting conspiracies, the review by Bloomberg News found. The list includes embezzlers such as a credit union teller who stole less than $20,000.

Of the 1,236 convictions from 2002 to 2007 in the review, 1,133 defendants were sentenced. Forty-seven percent of those got a year or less in prison.

Direct comparisons of sentences before and after 2002 can't be made because the Justice Department added a corporate fraud category in 2003 and the U.S. Sentencing Commission stiffened advisory guidelines.

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