Our society is shot through with injustices. Pro Publica has come up with... not so much another injustice (nothing new about it) but another sickening reminder of how far we are from our idea of America. The Washington Post reports on Pro Publica's investigators' findings.
White criminals seeking presidential pardons over the past decade have been nearly four times as likely to succeed as minorities, a ProPublica examination has found.
Blacks have had the poorest chance of receiving the president’s ultimate act of mercy, according to an analysis of previously unreleased records and related data.
Current and former officials at the White House and Justice Department said they were surprised and dismayed by the racial disparities, which persist even when factors such as the type of crime and sentence are considered. ...WaPo
The pardons issued by the Bush and Obama administrations have been closely examined.
Bush followed the recommendations of the pardons office in nearly every case, the aides said. The results, spread among hundreds of cases over eight years, heavily favored whites. President Obama — who has pardoned 22 people, two of them minorities — has continued the practice of relying on the pardons office. ...WaPo
Reliance on the pardons office's judgment may have been the problem. A spokesman for the Bush administration said the president had no idea of the applicant's race. Nonetheless, during the Bush years, the discrepancies are startling.
An African American woman from Little Rock, fined $3,000 for underreporting her income in 1989, was denied a pardon; a white woman from the same city who faked multiple tax returns to collect more than $25,000 in refunds got one. A black, first-time drug offender — a Vietnam veteran who got probation in South Carolina for possessing 1.1 grams of crack — was turned down. A white, fourth-time drug offender who did prison time for selling 1,050 grams of methamphetamine was pardoned.
All of the drug offenders forgiven during the Bush administration at the pardon attorney’s recommendation — 34 of them — were white. ...WaPo
Congress is hardly clean here.
Turning over pardons to career officials has not removed money and politics from the process, the analysis found. Justice Department documents show that nearly 200 members of Congress from both parties contacted the pardons office regarding pending cases. In multiple instances, felons and their families made campaign contributions to the lawmakers supporting their pleas. Applicants with congressional support were three times as likely to be pardoned, the statistical analysis shows. ...WaPo
Oh, and by the way, you're more apt to receive a pardon if you're "active in church." We tend to think of the 1950's as the "shut up and conform" decade. Has anything really changed?
