President George W. Bush
Image: Legal Times / Roberto Westbrook
Of the 157 full pardons issued by President Bush to date, almost two-thirds went to people whose convictions had occurred more than 20 years before they were pardoned, according to a leading pardon scholar, and every single pardon recipient had fully served their sentence years before they were pardoned.
In what she called a "very quick and dirty profile," Margaret Colgate Love, who served as U.S. pardon attorney between 1990 and 1997, said that only a handful of pardons went to people convicted less than 10 years before the pardon.
Love looked at the 157 individuals who were pardoned as well as the five individuals whose sentences have been commuted. (She did not count I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby because his prison sentence was, strictly speaking, remitted, not commuted.)
More than two-thirds of those pardoned spent no time in prison at all, noted Love, who specializes in executive clemency and restoration of rights, sentencing and corrections policy, and legal and government ethics.
"It has been a very trivialized use of the pardon power," said Love. "It is a very safe bunch of people. I'm sure these were all deserving, but the convictions are very old. It's just an unremarkable bunch of cases."
She called the numbers "surprising," given how President Bush had stretched his other constitutional powers.
Using information forms prepared by the Department of Justice, Love also found that:
• Twenty-one of the pardon grants went to people convicted more than 35 years before, and eight of those pardoned were convicted in the 1940s and 1950s.
• The most frequently pardoned offenses are in the general category of theft and fraud.
• President Bush also pardoned 29 drug offenders, 11 people convicted of a firearms-related offense, eight tax evaders, 11 bootleggers and seven car thieves, as well as teller embezzlers, thieving postal workers, gamblers, illegal dumpers, draft dodgers, election law violators and an odometer cheat.
Love said only 18 of the 157 people pardoned spent more than two years in prison, and 16 of these were convicted of drug offenses. (The other two were a savings and loan fraudster sentenced to three years, and an armed bank robber sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment.)
Love also noted that most of those pardoned (113) were not represented by a lawyer. Only one of the five individuals whose sentence was commuted was represented by counsel in connection with his clemency application.
