Editorial published in The New York Times on March 4, 2013
Last week, President Obama pardoned 17 people who had been convicted of felonies. An Na Peng, a Chinese citizen living in Hawaii, is the first person convicted of an immigration crime to be pardoned in many years. With the pardon, she can now become an American citizen. Lynn Marie Stanek, convicted in a minor drug deal, told her Oregon newspaper that the pardon would allow her to “move beyond my past in a tangible, legal and personally meaningful way.”
These women represent the reason the Constitution gives the president the power to grant “pardons for offenses against the United States” — to provide a check on the criminal justice system and the negative consequences of having a criminal record. A pardon does not erase the record, but restores rights lost from the conviction and affirms a person’s good character. On the federal books alone, there are 465 laws and 699 regulations that make life harder for people with criminal records.
While pardons for people with minor and old offenses — Ms. Peng’s conviction occurred in 1996 and Ms. Stanek’s in 1986 — are important, they are also small beans. The Obama administration’s criteria for favorable treatment seem narrow and unlikely to cause much political trouble for the president. Of the 17 pardoned, only five spent any time in prison, with the rest sentenced to probation, fines or a few months of home confinement.
The pardon power also allows a president to commute or shorten unjust sentences on a case-by-case basis. Many federal inmates are serving egregiously long prison terms under federal mandatory minimum sentencing schemes. Regrettably, Mr. Obama refused to grant petitions from federal prisoners to commute their sentences.
The president’s clemency actions seem to reflect a process still controlled by a Justice Department that is largely anti-pardon. For a president whose approval rate for pardons and commutations is woefully low compared with presidents going back to 1900, these pardons represent a step in the right direction — but a fainthearted, disappointing step.