Look at his pardon list from last night. It includes a large number of oversentenced drug offenders including a number of people serving life sentences for marijuana trafficking.
Corvain Cooper – President Trump commuted the sentence of Mr. Corvain Cooper. Mr. Cooper is a 41 year-old father of two girls who has served more than 7 years of a life sentence for his non-violent participation in a conspiracy to distribute marijuana.
It is not the number of pardons that is unusual (and it’s unsurprising that this administration has done less work than previous ones), but the sense that these pardons are so clearly in service of Trump’s personal agenda rather than true acts of clemency.
Can you find examples of bad pardons from other Presidents? No doubt. But not on this scale.
That's it. It's also the one where having the record of the prior crime expunged made a huge difference in the potential sentence for the DUI he was being prosecuted for at the time.
I'm not sure if it's better or worse to pardon someone above the table like that or for a president to throw their political weight around behind closed doors to get favorable treatment but it's slimy no matter how you cut it.
The drunk driving incident and the following DUI charge came several months after the pardon.
(Correction: it was the dropping of the case was months after the pardon. The drunk driving incident and subsequent prosecution was one month after the pardon)
And the prosecution started before the pardon. He got pardoned because it looked like he wouldn't be able to dodge the charge and was gonna get whacked with the kind of sentence that people with prior felonies get.
> Which of these is worse than pardoning your own drug trafficking, drunk driving brother?
The pardon of Roger Clinton is bad, but a number of Trump's pardons are worse. The critical difference is that Trump was pardoning people who betrayed the public trust. For example, he pardoned Duke Cunningham [1], a former Congressman who very explicitly sold his votes in Congress. And he pardoned Kwame Kilpatrick [2], the former mayor of Detroit who was elected on a promise to clean up Detroit's city government, but instead installed more than two dozen of his friends and family members in city government (they weren't competent, but they got high salaries), and who was convicted of extortion and racketeering.
It seems to me that a pardon that merely expunges a conviction for which the sentence was already served (as in the case of Roger Clinton) is quite different from a pardon that shortens or entirely preempts a prison sentence, or in some cases even preempts a prosecution (as in many of the pardons granted by Trump).
Another moral category is that, to my knowledge, Bill Clinton was not an accessory to Roger Clinton's crimes (in fact, as governor, he apparently even approved of his brother's arrest). Trump, in contrast, pardoned a number of people found guilty for crimes related to himself.
See the sibling reply explaining how Roger was being charged with DUI which would have carried much heavier sentences with a prior conviction on his record. The pardon effectively swept his DUI away to a misdemeanor.
The pardon did end up having that effect, but given that the pardon was issued in January 2001 and the DUI happened in February 2001, I have some degree of confidence that this was not intentional.
3000 minor drug offenses or 5 mob cronies.