Doug Berman, Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University:

"It's perhaps a sober reminder of the realities of criminal justice that President Bush's ceremonial pardoning of turkeys received a lot more press than his actual pardoning of people.  (As an aside, I cannot help but wonder if Alberto Gonzales wrote clemency memos for Biscuits and Gravy, the pardoned turkeys (background here).)

In any event, as this CNN story details, the President did issue six human pardons this week, all to persons who committed minor frauds long ago.  A few more details on some of the persons pardoned can be found here and here.

In response to an e-mail inquiring about these pardons, Margaret Colgate Love who served for twenty years in the US Department of Justice, including seven as US Pardon Attorney under the first President Bush and President Clinton, wrote a brief note detailing President Bush's approach to pardons and commutations during his first term.  You can download the full text of Margy Love's note below, and here are some highlights:>

Case statistics released last month by the Office of the Pardon Attorney in the Justice Department show that, since assuming office, Bush has granted a total of 25 pardons while he has denied 839 applications. His pardon grant rate is thus about 3% of all requests acted upon. (He has also denied 3,446 commutation requests, and that grant rate has too many zeroes to be meaningful.)  By contrast, most Presidents in the past 100 years have granted between 20% and 30% of the pardon applications they considered. (The exception is the first President Bush, whose 76 pardons represented only 11% of the requests he considered, but his low grant rate is because DOJ sent him almost nothing but denial recommendations — I know, I did it!  His son doesn't have the same excuse.) The OPA statistics indicate that there are 744 pending applications for pardon still awaiting action (plus 1729 requests for commutation).

All but one of Bush's 25 pardons have been utterly unremarkable, the exception being the deathbed pardon of David McCall, the former mayor of Plano, Texas, who applied on a Wednesday and received his grant on Friday. This is a guy who has definitely decided to play it safe in the compassion department!

Download margy_love_pardon_explanation.doc [November 19, 2004; Sentencing Law and Policy has the post]