Like Walker, Trump should not grant pardons
It appears President Donald Trump’s Oval Office meeting with Kim Kardashian West may have actually served a purpose other than to burn social media to the ground. Following the meeting, in which Trump and West discussed prison reform, Trump announced he would be pardoning right-wing controversialist Dinesh D’Souza, who was convicted in 2014 for evading federal campaign finance rules.
In 2014, D’Souza, author of the 2010 book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” pleaded guilty to a felony for providing a $20,000 contribution to New York Senate candidate Wendy Long while using name of an acquaintance. He was given five years of probation, sent to a halfway house for eight months, and forced to pay a $30,000 fine.
Thursday morning, Trump announced he would be pardoning D’Souza, a man who recently ridiculed high school students after a mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., and who blamed the Iraq War-era Abu Ghraib prisoner torture scandal on the “sexual immodesty of liberal America.” Trump tweeted that D’Souza had been “treated very unfairly by our government!”
Trump’s pardon of D’Souza is outrageous, given the lightness of the sentence the provocateur received. But it is an example of how the pardoning process itself is fraught with corruption and cronyism. Does anyone actually believe Trump would have pardoned either D’Souza or cretinous Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio had they not been passionate Trump shoe-lickers?
Here in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker has a firm policy of refusing to pardon anyone, which looks even more rational in light of recent Trump pardons. Walker’s policy is one adopted by many governors, as pardons have dropped since the 1980s; no Minnesota governor has granted a pardon or commuted a sentence in a quarter-century.
Clearly, executive pardons undermine the judicial process. After criminal trials that may take years and cost both defendants and taxpayers huge sums of money, it shouldn’t be up to one man or woman to decide the fate of someone found guilty by the courts. This is especially true of felons who have direct ties to either the governor or the president. (The fact that presidents often unload a slew of “death bed” pardons right before they leave office is essentially an admission that these are often special interest favors.)
Critics of Walker’s no-pardon policy complain that there are circumstances in which a convicted felon deserves to have his or her rights reinstated — rights like voting or being able to own a firearm. In some cases, they argue, not having these legal rights thwarts their ability to make a living.
Take, for example, the case of Jason Johnson, a Boscobel man who served five years in prison after shooting another man following an argument in 1997. Interviewed in 2013 by the Associated Press, Johnson complained that his job as a truck driver was hindered by his inability to haul loads into Canada.
But if there are compelling cases out there for clemency, they should be dealt with by state law, not by the capricious whims of a governor. In 2016, after the debut of Netflix’s “Making a Murderer” documentary, more than 100,000 people signed a petition urging the pardon of convicted murderer Steven Avery. (The petition was incorrectly addressed to the White House, which has no authority over state crimes.) But it would have been judicial malpractice for a governor to undermine the work of police and investigators simply to appease the distorted public opinion of the time.
In the legal world, Lady Justice is often portrayed in a blindfold, signaling her impartiality. We shouldn’t give her the chance to peek out from under the blindfold in order to read one of Dinesh D’Souza’s books.