Why Jonathan Pollard Got Life In making its case against Pollard, the government traveled a great distance: from choosing in its indictment not to charge Pollard with injuring the United States, to listing in the Victim Impact Statement allegations of damage to American interests, to raising in Secretary Weinberger's January declaration the specter of danger to American lives, to accusing Pollard of "treason" in Weinberger's eve-of-sentencing supplemental declaration. It almost appears that the government leveled a charge of lesser magnitude against Pollard; successfully secured his guilty plea; and then post-facto kept upping the ante, to the point where a life sentence became almost inevitable.
Now why would they do that ?
You know, just as an aside, I would think that it's patently obvious that Jonathan Pollard has singlehandedly done more to damage the cause of American Jews than almost anyone else. After Pollard, the anti-Semites will simply point to him and his dual loyalties when they say that Jews cannot be given positions of trust - and now, people will listen, where they might not have before. Hell, even Joe Lieberman knows this much...