Word: pardoners
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...Christmas Eve, Walsh charged Bush with "misconduct." Specifically, Walsh demanded to know why the President withheld until last month a 1986 personal diary that might be relevant to the inquiry. Those angry words followed Bush's pardon of six Iran-contra defendants, a move that set off a noisy debate. Were the pardons a show of compassion and personal courage -- or an act of expediency and political perfidy? Most critics seemed less annoyed by the pardons than by Bush's cavalier dismissal of the defendants' actual or alleged crimes as mere "policy differences." Last week the President clarified his position...
...will ever know whether or not Weinberger lied to Congress, even though a grand jury concluded there is reason to believe that he did. There is an inherent paradox in pardoning a suspect before he or she has been convicted of a crime. Semantically, a pardon cannot exist without an accompanying misdeed. A pardon is meant to be the last word on a case--a final chance at leniency. In Caspar Weinberger's case, the pardon is the first word...
President Bush has maintained that he is merely saving Weinberger the trouble of a long and arduous trial. Is Bush assuming that Weinberger is guilty? He seems to feel that, with or without a trial, the result will be the same--a presidential pardon. However, Bush cannot make this argument because a trial would have run well into Bill Clinton's presidency. Clinton, a Democrat, would be less sympathetic to Weinberger's problems...
...five of the cases, the men involved had already been convicted. Former National Security Adviser Robert F. McFarlane and aide Lyn Nofziger had been found guilty of perjury and lying to Congress. Yet their pardons are still on the edge of acceptability. Like President Ford's pardons of Watergate criminals, these pardons, however abhorrent, must be endured by law. Weinberger's pardon seems such an anomaly that it cannot be allowed to go unquestioned...
...courses of action are open to a dissatisfied public. No precedent exists for the overturning of a presidential pardon. According to Harvard Government Professor Gary King, there is "no standard way" to reverse a pardon. "The Supreme Court technically could come up with some convoluted logic," King said, but there is no official recourse or established jurisdiction for such a challenge...