Pardon the interruption

President Trump’s freeing from prison of Alice Marie Johnson, a 63-year-old greatgrandmother who had served 22 years of a life sentence handed down for a nonviolent drug offense, was a well-warranted act of mercy. But it was, by all accounts, arbitrary. The sage advice of Kim Kardashian West ought not determine who is granted leniency from a vast federal prison system. Nor should the recommendations of protesting football players, as invited Friday by a President who not long ago deemed them “sons of bitches.”

Determining how best to exercise pardon power takes discipline, focus and, yes, strategic thinking.

Johnson is not the only non-violent drug offender serving a life sentence in a federal facility. That describes nearly 2,000 prisoners, or a third of all lifers in lockup. (The 2,000 number, incidentally, also punctures an old liberal myth that federal facilities are teeming with people locked away on low-level drug charges.)

If Trump wants the Johnson pardon to be perceived as more than a favor to a celebrity friend, he ought to task a staffer with combing through those cases and determining who else merits similar treatment.

Start with people who’ve served at least 15 years for equivalent crimes. And those, like Johnson, who have no other criminal record of which to speak.

That would more closely resemble the approach begun by President Obama, who in his last two years issued a record number of commutations, most to people convicted of drug offenses. Three hundred and thirty came on his last day in office.

Trump should also correct his overheated rhetoric on drug crimes. He has called for the death penalty for some dealers and praised Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s campaign of extralegal killings of members of the drug trade.

You can’t believe in waging a scorched-earth war on drugs and freeing drug dealers. Or can you?