Pubdate: Sun, 27 May 2012
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Copyright: 2012 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1
Website: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388
Author: Debra J. Saunders

OBAMA MUST REFORM PRESIDENTIAL PARDONS

As a candidate for president in 2008, Sen. Barack Obama pledged to 
"immediately" review federal mandatory minimum sentences "to see 
where we can be smarter on crime and reduce the ineffective 
warehousing of nonviolent drug offenders." Obama also had written a 
memoir in which he admitted to using marijuana and cocaine - "maybe a 
little blow when you could afford it" - as a teen.

Linda Aaron, an Alabama grandmother, voted for Obama. For years, 
Aaron had been hoping that President George W. Bush would commute the 
obscenely long prison sentence of her son, Clarence. Because of 
draconian federal mandatory minimum sentencing, a federal judge 
sentenced Clarence Aaron when he was 24 to three sentences of life 
without parole for a first-time nonviolent drug offense.

Linda Aaron fully expected that if Bush didn't use his presidential 
pardon power to commute her son's sentence - and Bush did not - Obama 
would do so. It still hasn't happened. Clarence Aaron is now 43.

The candidate who pledged to look at sentence reductions for 
nonviolent drug offenders became the president who, after rejecting 
nearly 3,800 requests, has commuted only one sentence while in office.

This column is not simply about Clarence Aaron. It is about a justice 
system that cannot correct itself when it knows that it has gone overboard.

Aaron broke the law in 1992 when he connected cocaine dealers for two 
very large drug deals. He deserved to go to prison. But what country 
puts first-time nonviolent offenders in their 20s behind bars for the 
rest of their natural lives?

There is nothing just about a system that meted out shorter prison 
time to every other co-defendant in the case - including the drug 
dealers, all but one of whom are now free - than to a college student 
with no criminal record.

There is something perverse about a system that rewards drug dealers 
for pleading guilty and testifying against others, while showing no 
mercy toward amateurs who don't know how to game the system.

I've heard the arguments as to why Aaron doesn't deserve a pardon. 
Drug deals are inherently violent. In refusing to plead guilty, Aaron 
refused to accept responsibility for his criminal actions. (That's 
true and, because Aaron lied on the stand, the judge lengthened his sentence.)

If you believe those arguments, as some people of good faith do, you 
still have to acknowledge that the system punished Aaron more for not 
pleading guilty and lying on the stand than it did for his brief role 
in the drug business.

There is no sense of proportion here. Aaron is serving the same 
sentence as Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent turned traitor.

In 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice pardon attorney recommended 
that the president not commute Aaron's sentence. ProPublica recently 
reported that in a push for more favorable recommendations, the Bush 
White House had asked the Office of the Pardon Attorney to reconsider 
Aaron's application.

Unfortunately for Aaron, Pardon Attorney Ronald Rodgers passed along 
his predecessor's recommendation that Aaron's petition be denied. 
Rodgers failed to disclose that the U.S. attorney's office had 
reversed its position so that it supported a presidential commutation 
from life without parole to 25 years - so that Aaron would be 
released in 2014. Samuel Morison, who used to work in the pardon 
attorney's office, believes that Rodgers ill-served Bush, who would 
have commuted the sentence if his pardon attorney had passed on case facts.

On Thursday, Families Against Mandatory Minimums held an event to 
urge the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate the pardon 
attorney's office, in light of Rodgers' failure to pass on that key 
bit of news. Linda Aaron spoke at the event. Over the phone, she told 
me she is "puzzled" over Obama's failure to commute her son's sentence.

By any objective measure, Clarence Aaron's sentence of life without 
parole is a cruel anomaly.

I've been writing about his case for more than a decade because the 
criminal justice system won't accept responsibility and correct its 
pernicious excesses. Normally when something's broken, people who 
care for it fix it. But not the justice system.

Obama was supposed to bring sanity to a federal sentencing structure 
that over-punishes nonviolent drug offenders. But I guess he's just 
too busy to get to Clarence Aaron.
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