OPINION:
President Biden’s sweeping use of the pardon power should remove any objections to the next administration’s expected exercise of clemency. Two days before Christmas, the outgoing president granted clemency to the worst of the worst.
Thirty-seven death row inmates received commutations in what Mr. Biden said was an act of mercy to “prevent the next Administration from carrying out the execution sentences that would not be handed down under current policy and practice.”
Mr. Biden cites opposition to the death penalty as his underlying motive, but it’s a mistake to pretend this end-of-term maneuver will save lives. Among the midnight pardon’s beneficiaries is Carlos David Caro, who was arrested in 1988 for distributing marijuana before being arrested again for cocaine trafficking.
While serving time in 2003, another inmate referred to Caro using naughty words. Caro stabbed that inmate with an improvised knife 29 times. He was then transferred to a more secure prison and given a cellmate who refused to share his breakfast with Caro. So Caro strangled the man with a towel.
“It’s because they gave me a cellmate, and he disrespected me, so I took him down,” Caro said at the time.
The episode reveals the folly of extending mercy to those who do not seek it. Imagine the outrage if President-elect Donald Trump had shown mercy toward Ricky Allen Fackrell and Christopher Emory Cramer, two convicted robbers who joined Soldiers of Aryan Culture, a White supremacist prison gang.
While together in a maximum-security prison, they stabbed a third inmate 74 times during a gang dispute. The U.S. attorney assigned to the case made an appropriate observation at the time of their sentencing.
“These defendants had a violent history, and when the murder happens in a prison, it is clear that the defendants are always going to be a danger,” prosecutor Joseph D. Brown said. “This was an appropriate case for the death penalty and we will continue to seek that punishment in the worst cases.”
Edgar Baltazar Garcia and Mark Isaac Snarr also received commutations from Mr. Biden after they stabbed two prison guards, stole a set of keys and unlocked another inmate’s cell so he could be stabbed 50 times.
Or take pardon beneficiary Shannon Wayne Agofsky. He and his now-deceased brother kidnapped a small-town Missouri bank president to gain access to his company’s vault. After stealing $70,000, they duct-taped the man to a chair, added a concrete block and pushed him into a lake, where he drowned. Incarceration didn’t stop Agofsky from increasing his kill count.
A member of the White supremacist gang Sons of the Noblewolf Kindred, Agofsky beat to death an inmate who had seven years to go on his sentence for arson.
As these examples show, indiscriminately taking murderers off death row just gives them an opportunity to kill again. It’s as reckless as Mr. Biden’s decision earlier in the month to free nearly 1,499 convicts, 39 of whom were sentenced to jail for purportedly nonviolent offenses.
Given this expansive use of the presidential prerogative, President-elect Donald Trump should feel no reservations about issuing full pardons to those he calls the Jan. 6 political prisoners. They’ve suffered enough for their mistakes. A full pardon should also go to Douglass Mackey, who is appealing his conviction for posting a meme on Twitter in 2016 that mocked Hillary Clinton.
The pardon is meant to remedy miscarriages of justice like the latter, not to be handed out to White supremacists and unrepentant murderers.
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