{"id":51903,"date":"2009-11-26T09:25:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-26T14:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:criminaljustice.change.org:\/\/09af5f0a8175b0d161c2d435149f8240"},"modified":"2009-11-26T09:25:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-26T14:25:00","slug":"how-about-a-real-pardon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/51903","title":{"rendered":"How About a Real Pardon?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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President Barack Obama continued the ridiculous tradition yesterday of pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey and sending it to Disneyland. New change.org Animal Welfare blogger had urged Obama to end this silly practice<\/a>, but he didn’t listen.<\/p>\n

On top of it all, even the turkey pardon seems affected by the racial bias that pervades our criminal justice system. I linked last year to a blogger<\/a> who had pointed out that George W. Bush only pardoned white turkeys. Now it looks like his successor is keeping that tradition going. Apparently, Harry S Truman was the last President to pardon a black turkey.<\/p>\n

On a more serious note, however, the turkey pardon reminds us that there are many people sitting behind bars today who could use a real pardon. One of them is occasional change.org guest blogger Michael Santos. Michael’s wife Carole wrote a blog post yesterday<\/a> calling on the Obama administration to begin looking at some of the injustices festering within our federal prison system, and I can’t say it any better than her:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Carole wrote:<\/p>\n

Rather than participating in the ridiculous parody of pardoning a turkey, why can\u2019t President Obama find the courage to use the executive clemency and commutation process -\u2013 an act of mercy and grace that only he can grant? But Obama certainly isn\u2019t signaling that either grace or mercy are high on his list of priorities.\u00a0 He still hasn\u2019t issued a single pardon or commutation\u2026to a human being, that is.<\/p>\n

America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with hundreds of thousands of citizens being churned through the system. Yet our government continues to operate a prison system that exceeds $60 billion in annual costs, and wastes thousands of\u00a0 lives by measuring justice with nothing more than the passing of time.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, because this president \u2013like his predecessors\u2013thinks more of a turkey than he does of deserving human beings, my husband, Michael Santos, will continue to serve his 23rd consecutive year of confinement, even though he\u2019s had a commutation petition on file since 2003.<\/p>\n

In better news, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland this week granted pardons or commutations to 78 people this week <\/a>after he and his staff spent 1,000 hours reviewing nearly 300 applications. Several were clear-cut cases of injustice and the Governor has now set them right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Barack Obama continued the ridiculous tradition yesterday of pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey and sending it to Disneyland. New change.org Animal Welfare blogger had urged Obama to end this silly practice, but he didn’t listen. On top of it all, even the turkey pardon seems affected by the racial bias that pervades our criminal justice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51903\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}