TIMELY PARDONS

Presidential pardons got a bad name in the last days of President Bill Clinton’s administration, when he pardoned a lot of scoundrels, including the fugitive financier Marc Rich and a gang of Puerto Rican nationalists convicted of terrorism.

But the president’s pardoning power through the years has softened the hard edge of the criminal justice system, especially when mandatory sentences haven’t taken into account mitigating circumstances. An attorney general’s report in 1939 defined it as “the safety valve by which harsh, unjust, or unpopular results of formal rules can be corrected.”

With a nudge from The New York Times, George W. Bush has gone along with the holiday spirit and granted his first pardons. A Times contributor had noted that Mr. Bush had not granted a single pardon or commuted a single prison sentence as he neared the end of his first two years in office; last week he offered seven, all to men who had committed relatively minor offenses that included buying moonshine, refusing to join the military draft in 1957 and altering a car odometers. Ronald Reagan had granted 85 pardons by the same point. Jimmy Carter had granted 162; Gerald Ford, 253; Richard Nixon, 82. Each had also commuted some prison sentences. George H.W. Bush granted nine pardons and commuted one sentence in his first two years. Bill Clinton is the only president in the past 100 years to have granted no pardons at all in his first two years.

A Washington lawyer, Margaret Colgate Love, cited these figures in a New York Times op-ed page article last week. She is a former pardon attorney in the Justice Department from 1990 to 1997. She urged President Bush to demonstrate his kindness, fairness, and compassion by exercising his pardon power in this holiday season.

In a telephone interview. Ms. Love explained that, with growing emphasis on retribution, the pardon system has gradually decayed. Attorneys general have delegated pardon considerations to prosecutors and career bureaucrats. “Pardon applications have fallen off, but the Justice department still receives and processes many pardon applications, and Mr. Bush could call up the deputy attorney general, the official now in charge, and have cases for decision on his desk within a half hour,” she said.

In the Clinton administration, she said, the system had practically shut down because the president seemed uninterested in pardoning for much of his term. “Near the end, thinking of his legacy, he asked the department for cases to act on, and very few were forthcoming. So, instead of relying on professional investigation of the pardon applications, he decided simply to handle them with his own staff.

The result was that it appeared that he was using the presidential power to respond to political pressures and repay campaign favors.”

In a 2000 article in the Fordham Urban Law Journal, Ms. Love described the presidential pardon power as “an unparalleled bully pulpit from which to speak about criminal law issues, large and small, in the context of a specific fact situation.” For example, she said, “the harsh inflexibility of the drug sentencing laws, the mandatory deportation of aliens convicted of minor and sometimes dated offenses, the mitigating impact of domestic violence, and legislative curtailment of post-conviction judicial remedies.”

“It is, in short, an effective way to shape criminal justice policy and tell good news about the justice system at the same time,” she wrote.

Good for President Bush to have seized the opportunity to help both the criminal justice system and his own image before he heads into his third year. And good for Ms. Love for having suggested the action and told why it mattered.