The colorful stories behind Obama’s presidential pardons
Not everyone accepted Obama’s clemency. One man is waiting for it to be extended to others.
A former restaurant owner from Waco, in for crack cocaine crimes, elected to stay in jail as a “silent protest” against the imprisonment of nonviolent offenders.
“I would ask President Obama to sign each of the clemency petitions for nonviolent inmates, and let them go home to their families, so they can be productive and change themselves from the outside in.”
He also has some hopes about the President-elect helping criminals that we probably wouldn’t hold our breath on.
↩︎ posted Jan. 20, 2017
Only the Mafia made more money.
This is how you don’t get away with tax evasion: tell the papers about it. Cops found bags of money hidden throughout Studio 54, landing now-pardoned co-owner Ian Schrager in a little trouble.
↩︎ All That Is Interesting, posted Jan. 19, 2017
Almost every major outlet used the wrong photo for Chelsea Manning’s release story. That grainy black and white photo? It was meant to be private, sent to her therapist in 2010. This painting is her official portrait.
↩︎ posted Jan. 19, 2017
Your conservative take for the day: How did Obama find it in his heart to pardon “a brilliant creative who made his name curating a wonderland which was all about exclusivity and the elite of the elite,” whose primary accomplishment was running a cocaine distributorship for the rich and famous?
Truman Capote—passed out above—certainly partook. But he also offered a vision of the studio’s magnetic power: It’s “the nightclub of the future. It’s very democratic. Boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else—all one big mix.”
↩︎ posted Jan. 19, 2017
In 1981, the year most of the political prisoners were sentenced, the average federal sentence for murder was 10.3 years. Puerto Rican political prisoners—who were not convicted of hurting or killing anyone—were sentenced to an average of 65.4 years—six times longer.
Oscar Lopez Rivera was never convicted of hurting anyone, yet he served more than three times as long as he might have if he’d been a murderer.
↩︎ North American Congress on Latin America, posted Jan. 19, 2017
Manning’s sentence was commuted, not pardoned, suggesting mercy, not mistake, on Obama’s part.
Among her public services, illegal as they might have been, let’s center first on revealing that the military purposefully underreported the number of civilian deaths in Iran and Afghanistan. Second, she showed the world video footage (above) of American attack helicopters blowing up civilians, including Reuters journalists, in a mistaken attack the Pentagon attempted to cover up.
↩︎ posted Jan. 19, 2017
Chelsea Manning wasn’t the only soldier to receive a pardon after leaking military endeavors.
The United States and Israel developed the Stuxnet virus, which infected computers in the Iranian nuclear program to cause malfunctions in their centrifuges. But the secret program was exposed by Newsweek and New York Times reporters, and the trail led back to a four-star general, the former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Cartwright actually fainted when he realized that investigators were on to him.
There has always been something strange about the case, as it’s clear that Cartwright wasn’t the sole source of the leaks. Obama’s pardon could come as apology for making Cartwright the victim of infighting over whether America’s cyberwar capabilities need to be public to serve as an effective deterrent—a position Cartwright vocally held.
↩︎ posted Jan. 19, 2017