Begging Your Pardon, President Obama!

[douglas9]

For the past three years, a 75-year-old former banker from Miami named Peter Stanham has been marooned in an overcrowded, often violent federal immigration jail in Big Spring, Texas. He sleeps on a bottom bunk in a room with 16 other detainees.

In 2006, Stanham was convicted in connection with a bank-fraud case in Florida and was sentenced to nine years in prison. Because he wasn't a U.S. citizen, though he had lived here for 30 years, authorities sent him to the immigration system, rather than the minimum-security prison typically associated with white-collar criminals.

<snip

Drayton Curry is in even more danger of running out of time. At 92, he is the nation's oldest federal prisoner. In 1991, he was convicted in North Carolina of involvement in a drug-trafficking conspiracy. It was a nonviolent crime, but he was sentenced to life in prison under the nation's "three-strikes" laws, even though he had never been accused of committing any violent acts. (He had been convicted twice previously in connection with drug conspiracies, although the second of those convictions, in New York, was essentially for agreeing to pay someone's phone bill.)

Despite his age, his poor health, his good works in prison, and the fact that he has already served nearly 20 years, Curry cannot even get Barack Obama's pardon office, run by Bush holdover Ronald Rodgers, to rule on his petition.

<snip

The Obama administration has been more than skittish. Obama took nearly two years to issue his first pardon and has granted a total of only 17—nearly all for old, relatively minor convictions—and either rejected or ignored every single clemency petition that has been filed. Last May, with one stroke, he denied some 2,000 clemency petitions without explanation. Is it really possible there wasn't one valid clemency petition out of 2,000? Could it be because the backlog was so big, it was becoming an embarrassment?

http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/3131515/

[democrat_patriot]

1. Yes. He should let the bank fraudster and the drug dealer go free.

That would look good in an American Crossroads commercial.

Everything is weighed with how the other side will run with it. Everything.

[xchrom]

2. recommend

[Modern_Matthew]

3. Let the drug dealer go, leave the banker and give him some cell mates with something in common. nt