THOUSANDS SEEK PARDONS, FEW EVER RECEIVE THEM
“Kellyanne Conway lives just down the beach from me on the Jersey Shore,” he said of the White House counselor. “I could get her to say something to Trump.” He knows how to reach Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor. And oh! Tucker Carlson’s sister-in-law — he rents a place to her. “I guess this is how it works now,” Hendler said.
Few constitutional powers lie so wholly at the whims of the president as the power to pardon. No details need to be worked out beforehand and no agency apparatus is needed to carry a pardon out. The president declares a person officially forgiven, and it is so.
A layer of government lawyers has long worked behind the scenes, screening the hundreds of petitions each year, giving the process the appearance of objectivity and rigor. But technically — legally — this is unnecessary. A celebrity game show approach to mercy, doling the favor out to those with political allegiance or access to fame, is fully within the law.
The show isn’t new. Absolving political allies is a notorious if decades-old practice, and Bill Clinton was hardly sticking to procedure when he included friends, family and the well-connected in his last-minute clemency spree. But President Donald Trump is not waiting for the last minute.
On Tuesday, he issued more pardons, this time for two Oregon ranchers who had been serving sentences for arson on federal land. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was apparently among the ranchers’ strongest supporters. In addition to Arpaio, Trump has pardoned Dinesh D’souza, the conservative provocateur, and Lewis Libby, the former aide to Dick Cheney. At the urging of the actor Sylvester Stallone, Trump issued a posthumous pardon for Jack Johnson, the world champion boxer.
He has said he was considering pardons for Martha Stewart, the lifestyle guru, and Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, and people whose cases are championed by professional football players. He has rebuffed questions as to whether he was planning to pardon any of his own associates — or himself, for that matter.
Pardon seekers have been watching all this. Having once put their hopes in an opaque bureaucratic process, they are now approaching their shot at absolution as if marketing a hot startup: scanning their network of acquaintances for influence and gauging degrees of separation from celebrity. What’s the best way to get a letter to Sean Hannity, the Fox News host and close Trump ally? How hard would it be to pull aside Robert Jeffress, the prominent Trump-backing pastor, after a church service?
“It’s who you know now,” said Weldon Angelos, whose cause for clemency has been supported by politicians, judges and celebrities. At the consent of prosecutors, Angelos was released from prison in 2016, after serving a quarter of a 55-year sentence on a drug-related conviction. Now he is seeking a full pardon. “Everyone’s now trying to get their names out there, to get some buzz,” he said. “That’s the strategy I’m seeing.”
Clemency petitions go through the Office of Pardon Attorney in the Justice Department, a system set up more than 100 years ago to lessen the risks and hassles of leaving an entire nation’s pleas for compassion to one person. For decades, the process worked smoothly, and hundreds of clemency grants were issued each year. President Dwight D. Eisenhower alone granted over 1,000 pardons.
But starting about 40 years ago, “the prosecutors really got a hold of the process,” said Margaret Love, who was the pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997, and now represents clemency applicants. “They became increasingly hostile to the pardon power.”
Even as laws have grown harsher, the number of pardons has dwindled significantly.
“It is so secretive and the standards are so subjective,” Love said. “They operate like a lottery. Except a lottery is fair.”
In 2014, the Obama administration set up a clemency initiative that led to 1,715 sentence commutations, by far the most of any president. Still, this accounted for only about 5 percent of the commutation petitions submitted during his two terms. As for full pardons, the Obama administration was stingier than most of its predecessors. The traditional clemency process, as a pardon attorney described in her 2016 resignation letter, remained sidelined and backlogged.
“The process,” wrote Luke Scarmazzo of his attempt at clemency in the Obama years, “was a bureaucratic nightmare.” In 2008 Scarmazzo was sentenced to more than two decades in prison for running a medical marijuana dispensary in California. He and his co-defendant, Ricardo Montes, spent months working on an application, but in the end Montes received a commutation, while Scarmazzo did not.
Now, “instead of support from career politicians and judges, we’re seeking support from celebrities and influential social icons,” Scarmazzo wrote in an email from prison. “We’re less focused on pleasing the DOJ bureaucracy and more focused on grabbing the attention of the Oval Office.”
Much of the recent focus on clemency has either been on those, like Alice Johnson, who are seeking release from prison, or on the famous pardon recipients like D’souza. But there are countless people living quietly and whose time in the criminal justice system is years in the past, but who, because of the ever-expanding tally of consequences for felony convictions, feel permanently confined.
Alan Fields has been learning this for nearly 25 years. In 1994, he was arrested for working as a cash courier in a drug network overseen by some Detroit high-rollers. He pleaded guilty, testified and was ultimately sentenced to one day in prison. Life was his again, or what was left of it.
A teaching career was not open anymore. Insurance sales was out, given the licensing requirements. Nursing was off-limits, though he eventually married a physician — and he did manage to get work in pharmaceutical sales, because the application asked only about convictions from the previous five years. He could not go hunting, or own a gun. Even his seasons of coaching his son’s youth baseball team were cut short when the league started conducting background checks. Prison or not, a felony conviction, said Fields, 57, is “a life sentence.”
For years he studied presidential candidates, guessing their inclinations to mercy. Al Gore and Ron Paul seemed promising. Then he saw Barack Obama and thought: “OK, this is the ideal.”
Fields’ petition, filed in 2011, was sterling. His sentencing judge wrote in support. He had not gotten so much as a speeding ticket in decades. He was planning on — and is now enrolled in — law school. He seemed to be exactly the kind of person that Obama wanted to help: a black man with a drug-related conviction who has made the most of his second chance.
The federal agents came around, asking his neighbors and co-workers about him. At the end of 2016 Fields got a letter from the Justice Department, telling him to make sure his information was up to date. Please respond quickly, it said, and he did.
Inauguration Day came, and went.
The soft-spoken Fields, once too embarrassed about his conviction to lobby his congressional representatives for a pardon, recognizes that the circumstances have changed.
“Now I’ve taken a different position,” he said as he gave a resigned smile across the table. “Obviously.”
On his usual Friday afternoon drive home to Dallas from Houston, a man named Doug Edwards was considering the new strategies himself. “My wife said, ‘Why don’t you send a letter to Franklin Graham?’” he said.
Edwards, 64, and his wife volunteer as hosts to children flown to the United States for surgical procedures through an organization run by Graham, the evangelical leader who supports Trump. This work was part of the case he had made when he applied for a pardon a few years earlier, as evidence that he was trying to lead a productive, rule-abiding life.
He had broken the rules in his wild youth — with a marijuana conviction from 1976 — but he had tried hard ever since, he said, “to be one small cog in a great big wheel.”
Because of his record, he could not re-enlist in the Navy, or join law enforcement, but he did go on to help build hospitals and prisons.
And that is why he won’t contact Graham.
“What a slap in the face,” he said. “I’d get it because I know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody. It wouldn’t be because I’m a good citizen, law-abiding, trustworthy, on the merits.”
Edwards looked up at the highway to Dallas. “Do we abide by the current law or do we take on the assumption that you get things by other avenues?” he asked. “I, Doug Edwards, choose to adhere to the letter of the law.”