A new batch of Bush pardons and a crack commutation

As detailed in this AP story, the White House has just announced that “President Bush granted pardons Tuesday to carjackers, drug dealers, a moonshiner and an election-laws violator but not to I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.”  Also conspicuously absent from the list of 29 convicts granted a pardon are former Border Agents Compean and Ramos.  As the AP story details, “[n]early all of those to win pardons this year were small-time crooks who at most were imprisoned for five years.  Many of them never served time at all, and instead were fined or put on probation.” 

Fascinatingly, the single commutation in this batch of clemency grants (official list here) was to a defendant sentenced to nearly 20 years on a crack offense and still serving that sentence.  It is quite an amazing bit of timing that one of a tiny handful of Bush commutations was granted to a crack defendant on the very same day that the US Sentencing Commission made its reduced guidelines retroactive and the day after the Kimbrough ruling.  Amazing times and a December to remember.

Coincidentally, it seems, the folks at The Huffington Post here have started a “I’ll Be Freed For Christmas 2008 George W. Bush Pardon Pool.”

Some related posts:

• Scooter Libby drops appeal … is a holiday pardon on the way?
• Bipartisan call for commuting border agent sentences
• Another bipartisan call for President Bush to commute border agent sentences
• Few giving the President sentencing thanks
• ACS issue brief on the pardon power
• Latest FSR issue on “Learning from Libby”