Ali’s estate says no thanks to pardon
The presidential pardon is to Donald Trump what the car giveaway is to Oprah.
If only he had a studio audience to which he can hand them out to one and all. “You get a pardon! You get a pardon! You get a pardon!”
The president has granted a number of high-profile pardons and commutations in the past few weeks. On Friday, he seemed to be extending an olive branch to NFL players by asking them for recommendations on who should be pardoned.
Trump also said Friday he is thinking “very seriously” about pardoning boxing legend Muhammad Ali, who died in 2016.
“He wasn’t very popular then ... his memory is very popular now,” Trump said at the White House before leaving for the G-7 summit in Canada.
The response from Ali’s estate was a lukewarm thanks, but no thanks.
“We appreciate President Trump’s sentiment, but a pardon is unnecessary,” Ron Tweel, who has represented Ali and his family for decades, told NBC. “The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Muhammad Ali in a unanimous decision in 1971. There is no conviction from which a pardon is needed.”
In 1967, Ali was convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to five years in prison after he refused to report for induction in the Vietnam War. He was also stripped of his heavyweight title.
Ali, who had cited his Muslim faith and declared himself a conscientious objector, appealed the decision.
In 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned Ali’s conviction, finding that his conscientious objector status was valid.
A year after Ali’s death, then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began to kneel during the national anthem before NFL games. He said it was in protest of the oppression of people of color and with issues of police brutality against the African-American community.