US Presidential Pardons Heavily Favor Whites

Mumia Abu-Jamal remains on death row in Pennsylvania. The widow of slain police officer Daniel Faulkner has been used to push for the execution of Jamal despite his unfair trial., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

US presidential pardons heavily favor whites

Tue Dec 6, 2011 6:32PM
presstv.ir

White criminals seeking presidential pardons over the past decade have been nearly four times as likely to succeed as minorities, a ProPublica examination has found.

Blacks have had the poorest chance of receiving the president's ultimate act of mercy, according to an analysis of previously unreleased records and related data.

Current and former officials at the White House and Justice Department said they were surprised and dismayed by the racial disparities, which persist even when factors such as the type of crime and sentence are considered.

"I'm just astounded by those numbers," said Roger Adams, who served as head of the Justice Department's pardons office from 1998 to 2008. He said he could think of nothing in the office's practices that would have skewed the recommendations. "I can recall several African Americans getting pardons."

The review of applications for pardons is conducted almost entirely in secret, with the government releasing scant information about those it rejects.

ProPublica's review examined what happened after President George W. Bush decided at the beginning of his first term to rely almost entirely on the recommendations made by career lawyers in the Office of the Pardon Attorney.

The office was given wide latitude to apply subjective standards, including judgments about the "attitude" and the marital and financial stability of applicants. No two pardon cases match up perfectly, but records reveal repeated instances in which white applicants won pardons with transgressions on their records similar to those of blacks and other minorities who were denied.

President Obama -- who has pardoned 22 people, two of them minorities -- has continued the practice of relying on the pardons office.

FACTS & FIGURES

A 2008 USA Today/Gallup poll found most Americans said racism was widespread against blacks in the United States. This included a slim majority of whites (51%), a slightly higher 59% of Hispanics, and the vast majority of blacks (78%).

Americans also see racial discrimination as a major factor in four specific problems facing the black community -- lower average education levels for U.S. blacks, lower average income levels for U.S. blacks, lower average life expectancies for blacks, and a higher percentage of blacks serving time in U.S. prisons.

According to statistics released by the U.S. Federal Investigation Bureau on November 23, 2009, a total of 7,783 hate crimes occurred in 2008 in the United States. Among those more than 70 percent were against black people.

African-Americans are 13 percent of America's population and 14 percent of the nation's drug users but are 37 percent of persons arrested for drugs and 56 percent of the inmates in state prisons for drug offenses. Counterpunch