Radley Balko has a withering critique of the way the media has handled Mike Huckabee's decision to commute Maurice Clemmons's sentence. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Clemmons shot four police officers in Washington state. Balko writes:
The wisdom of a pardon or clemency granted because a particular verdict, sentence, or application of the law was unjust ought to be judged on precisely that, and only that—whether the final outcome is consistent with our notion of justice. What happens later is irrelevant.
Huckabee claims that he made the decision because he felt that Clemmons' sentence was unjust, given his youth and much shorter sentences given in similar cases. I admire Huckabee's courage that -- as a Republican governor in Arkansas -- he saw fit to grant clemency to a 16-year-old adolescent sentenced to 103 years in prison, all for crimes that did not involve “pointing weapons at or inflicting bodily harm to another person.” But I worry that this incident may deter other governors from granting clemency at all.
Meanwhile, Balko laments:
[T]he far more common use of the pardon and clemency power is to confer forgiveness and mercy on those who have confessed to their crimes, done time, and convinced a governor or president they have rehabilitated.
Used this way, the power is no longer a check on injustice or misapplication of law so much as an almost godlike proclamation that a wayward soul has been redeemed.
Now I happen to think rehabilitation should play more of a central role in our prison system than it currently does. But the practice of pardoning based on an individual's perceived reformation is a response to a legal system in which punishments -- particularly among certain groups -- exceed the severity of their crime with regularity. I concede the point that a clear attempt to correct an unfair sentence is certainly safer for the judge than a pardon predicated on a belief in an individual's reform. But in a system where “3 strikes” and "mandatory minimums" render an individual almost beyond hope, the dynamic between judge and prisoner -- redeemer and redeemed -- would seem inescapable. As long as the systemic problem of over-sentencing continues to be addressed on an ad hoc basis by judges whom Balko describes as the “last refuge for those who have fallen through the cracks in the criminal justice system,” both mercy and clemency will remain integral factors.
--Laura Dean
