Barack Obama pardoned a couple of turkeys named Liberty and Peace this morning, sparing them from becoming Thanksgiving dinner for someone on Thursday. This lighthearted tradition is good holiday PR, but it must ring hollow with the human beings in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.
Some presidents have used pardons in questionable ways, such as the flurry of 140 pardons granted by Bill Clinton on his last day in office. In Clinton’s case, many of the people involved had personal or political connections to Clinton or other Democrats. That’s still not as many as the 204 people who Richard Nixon pardoned in one day near the end of his checkered time in office. (And remember that Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon for his Watergate-related crimes even before Nixon was charged.) More recently, George W. Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence was controversial because Libby was an administration official convicted of leaking information for political purposes.
The evidence is clear that presidents don’t mind using pardons to help their friends and politically connected associates, so why aren’t they willing to use the power to help people in this country who are in prison despite the fact that it’s clear they’re innocent?
If you don’t believe we have a problem with wrongfully convicted people, you’re wrong. That’s not an opinion. It’s a fact. We have example after example of people who have spent years in prison despite not having been guilty of the crimes they were convicted of. If you’d like details, you’ll find plenty of harrowing examples at the website of the Innocence Project, which works to help release people who are demonstrably innocent.
My best guess is that presidents don’t use their constitutional pardon power to help innocent people because they’re afraid of looking soft on crime. After all, the people they do grant pardons to are generally nice upper-middle class people who look “safe” on the news. Many of the innocent are black or Hispanic or poor — and many look the part of thugs. So presidents play it safe. They release the smiling people in coats and ties. They let the poor and minorities rot in prison.
The next time you see a smiling president and happy children at the annual Thanksgiving day turkey pardon, remember that there are human beings who deserve to be there instead of the turkeys.