Posted on 07/14/2015 6:26:17 PM PDT by jfd1776
On July 13, 2015, Barack Obama proudly announced 46 commutations at a federal prison.
It’s not unusual for a president to pardon people or commute sentences. Many presidents and governors do so occasionally, hopefully when they are absolutely convinced that the criminal justice system otherwise failed an innocent defendant.
There are exceptions, of course. Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, in a well-intentioned effort to heal the nation after the Watergate “scandal” (though calling any political kerfuffle a “scandal,” in light of the Obama administration’s notorious daily crimes, does seem an abuse of the word). And Bill Clinton used the pardon process to release campaign donors and other political supporters, or law clients of relatives and friends, despite their having been undeniably guilty of such crimes as tax evasion, bank fraud, bribery, Medicaid fraud, trading with the enemy…
So, yes, unjustifiable pardons and commutations aren’t completely unprecedented.
But this was at least “unusual” – for a couple of important reasons:
There was no real claim of innocence involved. There are 46 drug offenders in federal prison, and the president wanted to let them go. Simple as that.
There was no claim of unfair trials; the president just thought that their sentences were long. He, as president, decided on his own that he should be the arbiter of the length of all sentences, even though Congress and the judicial system have carefully thought out and established sentencing guidelines for all these crimes. Simple as that.
There was no shame. Bill Clinton issued his famous “final days pardons” quietly, in the midst of a lively and noisy presidential transition, but Barack Hussein Obama issued them at a vocal press conference, drawing as much attention to it as humanly possible.
Why? Because he wanted to make a point – that, in his opinion, we shouldn’t be imprisoning so many people, and we sentence people for too long. In his opinion.
So, with the stroke of a pen, Barack Obama set 46 drug dealers free.
The Purpose of Prison
Why do we sentence people to prison at all? There are a number of reasons.
Government’s primary role is to preserve the liberty of the sovereign citizen. That’s the reason we institute governments; it’s the reason we are willing to surrender some of our freedom to a distant government: because without doing so, we are likely to lose all of our freedom to someone else.
The criminal justice system is therefore a fundamental part of the government – a complex system of police to catch criminals, courts to prosecute them, and jails to incarcerate those found guilty.
Incarceration is designed partially to punish the criminal, giving some degree of vengeance to the wronged party and to society (for when any citizen’s rights are violated through the breaking of just laws, all of society is wronged, not just the direct victim). If you rob, rape, assault, or kill, you deserve to be punished. There are stocks, work gangs, solitary confinement, work release programs, community service, all options, varying from state to state and jurisdiction to jurisdiction, depending on the severity of the crime and the criminal’s past record… but the most common punishment, by far, is just a long time in jail. The longer you lock them up, the more punishment they’re receiving.
But incarceration is also designed for this key reason: to protect society. We don’t just lock people up to punish them; we lock them up because we believe they might do it again if we don’t. And in fact, it’s undeniably true: the recidivism rate for most crimes, particularly drug-related crimes, is astronomical. We try to lock up many criminals for decades, hopefully until they’re too old to work in the drug trade anymore… or the burgling trade, or the mugging trade… in short, in the hope that they won’t return to their neighborhoods the next day, to do it all again.
So, by releasing these 46 convicted drug dealers early, knowing that only a few can be hoped to go straight, Mr. Obama has essentially flooded the community with about forty more drug dealers than they had before. Granted, considering this administration’s release of hundreds of thousands of criminal illegal aliens (there are over 346,000 running around free, and that’s just the number they’ll admit to), this is a drop in the bucket.
Nevertheless, it is worth noting, isn’t it, that Mr. Obama is more concerned about the feelings of the drug dealers, who are in jail for so long, than the feelings of the law-abiding citizens into whose midst he is releasing these reprobates.
A real American would think of the neighborhoods that were made safer by these criminals’ incarceration; by contrast, the occupant of the White House thinks of the comfort of the criminals.
The Court System
The administration is counting on two things: that the American people agree that drugs should be legalized anyway, so these laws are unjust, and that the American people either don’t understand how courts work in practice, or they won’t make the connection in this case.
He’s certainly at least partially wrong on the first part – there are certainly plenty of people who vote against him who believe that the drug trade should remain illegal – but he may be right about the other part. While Americans all know how the courts work – the operations of the courts are a foundation of a ton of television shows – few make the connection when they read stories like these. So let’s take a moment to consider:
Criminals are almost never caught the first time they commit a crime, or even the tenth or twentieth. There are just too many crimes, there’s just too little evidence; there are just too few police.
Even when they are caught, they are rarely prosecuted; it’s too costly unless the evidence is solid. Better not to tie up the court system with a case we’d lose; better to focus on the winnable cases.
So when they are prosecuted at last, it’s generally because the prosecutors have an ironclad case: lots of charges, most of them assuring an easy conviction. But there’s still the cost and complexity of a trial, so they sit down to a dealmaking table.
The prosecutors lay out the case against the perpetrator: “your client is clearly guilty of this, and this, and this, and this, and this. We go to trial next month, and your client might get forty years.” The defendant’s attorney then responds: “but you don’t want to tie up the court and spend all that money, and you never know how the jury will act, and I’m a darned good lawyer, so….”
And before you know it, the prosecutor and defense attorney have come up with a “plea bargain:” an agreement that both can live with. We lock him up for a long time, but perhaps not as long as we might have, in exchange for dropping some of the charges and saving the time, cost, and risk of a long trial. This is truly a win-win for society.
But as a result, we have a situation that reporters will necessarily mis-report, when the case makes news, years later.
In the news releases about the July 13 forty-six, every name was followed by a snapshot of the conviction: the convict’s name, how long he’s spent in jail so far, and the crime he was convicted of. In almost all cases, these people were convicted of distributing cocaine, distributing meth, distributing other drugs.
But what they leave out is the backstory of the plea deal. In order for a criminal to get ten, fifteen, twenty years to life, the criminal had to have been guilty of other things as well, even if they were pled away at the time.
So we know – if we just take the moment to reason it out – that this list includes gang members and gang recruiters; it includes thugs guilty of assault; it includes robbers, muggers and burglars; it includes violent criminals.
The administration declares that these are non-violent criminals, but that’s deceptive, at least. In fact, they are criminals convicted of federal crimes, who come from one of the nation’s most violent industries. There is NOTHING non-violent about meth. There is NOTHING non-violent about the cocaine trade.
By setting these criminals free, the administration doesn’t just inflict another 40-some drug dealers on communities that are already suffering enough under this administration’s malevolent policies, they take advantage of the plea bargaining system – a system that works well and logically, when used right, particularly at the federal level. They didn’t pick drug dealers whose rap sheet listed the conviction for knocking over a store, or beating a guy or raping a girl; they picked drug dealers whose convictions didn’t mention those crimes specifically, and counted on the public to fail to put two and two together.
But we KNOW the drug trade. We know who and what it involves. We know the people who produce and distribute this poison. We know what happens to people who use this stuff. We’ve seen meth houses blow up, we’ve seen the toothless emaciated denizens destroyed by crack. We’ve seen the babies in the neonatal wards of hospitals, surrounded by tubes and wires, desperately trying to survive, after their biological parents infected them with disease and drug addiction in the womb.
We know what these convicts were part of, and we ask, How DARE that man in the White House call it “non-violent”?
The Imperial President
This administration serves, in many ways, as the culmination of a century-long process to centralize power in the hands of the national executive branch.
Wilson may have begun it with his early “progressive” ideas… the four-term Roosevelt accelerated it by creating federal agencies, all under the president’s control… Johnson and Carter certainly expanded them to the point where nothing could control them, so they could become an untrackable hydra, a self-sustaining bureaucracy that could expand its reach even under Republican presidents, because no overseer could ever know everything they were doing…
But Barack Obama has broken every speed record. He uses every agency, every connection in every branch, to accelerate executive power. Every new idea – a tax for carbon, a permit for drilling, a loan for college, a grant for research, a subsidy for commercial development – every new proposal from this administration gives the president and his appointees a hook into an area that was previously free of executive control, or even free of federal involvement at all.
Our nation was founded to keep government small. No, not just the federal government… but ALL government. Our Founding Fathers didn’t want Washington DC to be tiny so that Springfield, Madison, Lansing and Sacramento would be huge; no, they intended for those state capitols to be tiny as well. The states should manage the roads; cities should have police, water, sewer, fire; the feds should establish a stable currency and a national defense… every level of government should be kept as small as possible.
The 20th century progressives, and the Obama administration in particular, have eaten away at the root of the American system like termites in a wooden home’s foundation. Every level of government is now so uncontrolled, people just ask “Do we like this idea or not? Is it a good idea?” rather than the questions our Framers intended for them to ask: “Can we even legally CONSIDER doing this or not? Is it Constitutional? Even if we like the idea, Is It Legal?”
Congress and the states have declared their position on sentencing guidelines. Over the years, they have changed their opinions, and they have changed the level of flexibility that judges are given in the matter. There is a process for it, a stable process in place, enabling the shared sovereignty on which our nation was founded.
But once again, Barack Obama has reached into another branch’s area and singlehandedly made policy. He wants to set criminals free, so he does. He wants to change the federal guidelines that are Congress’ prerogative, not his, so he does anyway.
What does this do to the criminal justice system? Do we need to change the way we arrange plea bargains? Do we really need to make sure that all the criminals’ other crimes get listed too, somehow, just so they show up if some future pardon-happy executive feels like setting them free, as the White House did this week?
And what does it do to us, as Americans… already strapped, already suffering the destruction of an eight-year-long, federally-constructed recession… we may soon need to start finding a way to fund the ermine robes, marble thrones, crowns and scepters of an imperial president who acts, in everything but title, like he’s nothing less than an emperor.
Copyright 2015 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is an international trade consultant and Customs broker. His columns are found regularly in Illinois Review.
Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook or LinkedIn, or on Twitter at @johnfdileo, or on his own site at johnfdileo.com.
The full list is available here.
Caution: The source has been shown to wholly unreliable, lies often and is purely politically motivated, none the less it is worth looking at the list.
He will before he is done will crank out tens of thousands more
Good evening.
Right, I didn’t go into detail on the reported crimes of each of the 46 criminals.
That’s been reported in the MSM, since the White House shared the list, as I described in my column. The Blaze shared it in full, and I linked to their news story.
My columns are already around 2000 words, so I normally don’t repeat the full details that are reported in the mainstream media; I just comment on them, figuring that my audience has usually heard the basics either on the airwaves or in print already.
Especially in this story; I don’t think anybody needs every column discussing the issue to list the conviction paragraph on all 46 of these losers! :-)
Cheers,
JFD
I was expecting pot dealers and all I saw where crack heads (I did not review the whole list).
My intent was: "there is more here then meets the eye" But it is worse then I thought!! Cheers!
Obama is playing to his tribe.
Apparently Dinesh D’Souza, and the 4 Americans being held in Iran didn’t have the same militant faith.
For another way to look at this let me tell you the story of my sister-in-law.
She started taking drugs when she was 13; she had horrendous parents and a terrible childhood. She continued to take drugs and probably sold some, completely under the radar, until she gave birth to her second child who was born with drugs (some sort of speed) in his system. It was her wake-up call. The state system took over and the baby was fostered out (I took him). She was not sent to state prison but had to work very hard to get her baby back, which she did when he was nine months old. She was (and still is) drug free.
Fast forward a year later after she finished up with drug court and got her baby back. Out of nowhere, she is arrested for a federal drug offense. It seems several years before all this happened she and a friend that lived clear across the country had come up with a plan where she would mail to her friend some speed for her friend to sell. She did it ONE time and decided it wasn’t a good idea and stopped.
A year later the friend was arrested by the feds on a completely unrelated drug charge. There’s a saying about the feds, something like, “give us three and you’ll go free.” What it means is if you turn in three of your friends, you’ll either go free or get a lighter sentence. So this friend turned in my sister-in-law for the aborted drug mailing fiasco.
Right when she’d put her life together this happens. To make a long story short, she ended up having to do two years in prison in a state called North Dakota. And she was lucky to only get two years. At the time she was at a point in her recovery where she wouldn’t lie, and certainly wouldn’t turn in anyone else to get a lighter sentence. She told me AA calls it “the wreckage of the past.”
It’s possible that some of these people may not be as bad as they appear.
I’m very sorry to hear about your sister in law’s experience. Happy she’s out of it now.
But no, I don’t believe it’s possible that any of this 46-lot is her kind of person. These are drug dealers, and worse. They’ve all been in for ten, fifteen, twenty years.
After the plea bargain process, they still got convicted and sentenced for a long time. These are not casual users or harmless people. Not at all.
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