A GOOD USE OF PARDONS

Another View From The Washington Post

Almost all of the 63 executive clemencies President Clinton granted
recently - including the one granted former House Ways and Means Committee
chairman Dan Rostenkowski -- were fairly ordinary holiday pardons of people
who already had served their sentences. That meant they were largely
symbolic gestures of forgiveness requiring little in the way of
presidential courage. But four were in a different category, involving
people still in jail or, in one case, a man who had yet to serve a sentence.

Of those four, the most significant were the most obscure. Clinton commuted
the lengthy sentences on drug charges of two women, Dorothy Gaines and
Kemba Smith. Both had been bit players in crack rings, yet had received
hugely disproportionate prison terms of 19 and 24 years respectively. The
commutations point out the excesses that federal drug sentencing laws are
capable of producing, and they also remedy serious individual injustices.

In his weeks left in office, Clinton would do a great service if he found
other such cases where clemency is appropriate. We have in mind not the
cases that likely would make headlines. Clinton reportedly is considering
pardons for Whitewater criminals Susan McDougal and Webster Hubbell, for
example, and has said he would consider the possibility of clemency for
Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist convicted of killing two FBI
agents back in 1975. Those would be one-time-only political acts.

Where the pardon power could make a lasting difference is in regard to
nonviolent drug offenders. By letting more go, the president can draw
attention in his final days in office to the injustice of a distorted
federal drug sentencing system that does no one any good. The commutations
the other day -- along with a batch over the summer -- were a good start,
but the recent commutations also were buried beneath the group of Christmas
pardons that conveyed a far more general message. Clinton could do much
worse than to go out with a strong statement that we need to re-examine
this area of criminal law.