Comparing presidential pardons through the years
Donald Trump may have issued more than 200 clemency grants — many of them to family and political supporters — but the number is far smaller than the thousands of pardons issued by Democratic presidents for nearly a century. A recent study comparing presidential pardons by the Pew Research Center shows that Trump granted clemency to just 2 percent of the 11, 611 who applied, among the lowest for any president in history. Barack Obama, who granted clemency to 5 percent of those who petitioned him, commuted the sentences of 1, 715 prisoners, most of whom had been convicted of “low-level, non-violent drug offenses, ” said Jeffrey Crouch, an expert on presidential pardons at American University in Washington, D. C. The “clemency initiative, ” which began in 2014, sought to commute the sentences of federal inmates who had served at least 10 years on non-violent drug charges, had demonstrated good conduct in prison and would have received much lower sentences if they had been convicted of the same offense now. The program was discontinued in Obama’s second term after a report from the Department of Justice’s inspector general found that the initiative was poorly planned. Among the controversial recipients of Obama’s acts of clemency was Chelsea Manning, the Army intelligence analyst convicted of leaking US military and diplomatic secrets to Wikileaks in 2010. Manning’s 35-year prison sentence was commuted in January, 2017. But Obama’s long list is dwarfed by that of fellow Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who granted more than 3, 600 pardons and commutations during his 12 years in office. Many of these were for people who had been convicted for Prohibition-era crimes after the constitutional ban on alcohol was lifted during Roosevelt’s first year in office in 1933. Roosevelt also offered clemency to hundreds who were serving prison terms for sedition because they opposed the US’ entrance into World War I in 1917.“They have paid the penalty that the law imposed on them, ” wrote Roosevelt in 1933 of the war protestors. “The emergency that made it necessary to punish them has long expired. ”Roosevelt’s actions touched on the very essence of presidential pardon power, which is enshrined in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. The presidential pardon sought to “restore the tranquility of the commonwealth, ” according to founding father Alexander Hamilton. Gerald Ford believed he was doing just that when he issued a pardon in 1974 to his predecessor Richard Nixon “for all offenses against the United States, ” a reference to the Watergate scandal that resulted in Nixon’s resignation. Ford said the pardon was necessary to end the divisions in the country — a decision that ultimately ruined the Michigan Republican’s political career, historians say.“He got crushed in the 1974 midterms, ” said Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College in Maine.
All data is taken from the source: http://nypost.com
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