Word: pollarding
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...Pollard, you may wonder. Is he one of the other Iran-Contra hoods whom Bush let off the hook? Sorry. My take on the whole pardon thing is a bit different than the others that have graced this page in the last two weeks. I'm less concerned about guys like Lawrence Walsh and Robert MacFarlane than about a Jewish man named Pollard marking time in a federal penitentiary. Since Casper W. Weinberger '38 helped secure a term of life imprisonment for Pollard, only Bush could have ended his excessive punishment by granting Pollard a pardon. But Bush let Weinberger...
...Jonathan Pollard was arrested in 1985 and charged by the U.S. government with spying for Israel. Hoping to receive a lesser sentence and to avoid a media trial that would have involved classified material, Pollard agreed to a plea bargain. He received a promise that, in exchange, the court would impose a sentence of "a substantial period of incarceration and a monetary fine"--language that legal experts interpreted to mean a sentence less than life imprisonment...
However, in March 1987, on the day of sentencing, then-Secretary of Defense Weinberger submitted an affidavit to the court stating that "It is difficult for me, even in the so-called year of the spy, to conceive a greater harm to national security than that caused by [Pollard]." In discussions with reporters, Weinberger had also said that Pollard "deserved to be hanged." Pollard did, in fact, receive the maximum sentence of life imprisonment--the decision to which Weinberger was clearly alluding in his sworn statement. Indeed, Pollard's lawyers later argued that Weinberger violated the terms of the plea...
Certainly Pollard had commited crimes and deserved to serve time in jail. But life? As Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz writes in Chutzpah, the penalty of life imprisonment for acts of espionage is "rarely imposed even on those who spy for our enemies and never imposed on those who spy for our friends." Dershowitz points out that, at the time of Pollard's conviction, "the average prison sentence imposed on a defendant convicted of spying for a U.S. ally, like Israel, was less than five years...
...Pollard was singled out and hit with the largest prison term ever given an American spying for a U.S. ally. In addition, Pollard's wife, Anne--who has since divorced the jailed spy--faced two concurrent five-year sentences for being an accessory after the fact. She was released after spending more than three years in prison--more time, says Dershowitz, than any American ever spent in jail for a comparable crime...