Yesterday I noticed two interesting pieces providing some context for Prez Trump's decision last week to make his first use of the clemency power a pardon for Joe Arpaio (basics here). Here are their headlines, links and leads:
From CNN here, "This chart shows why Trump's pardon of Arpaio was so unusual":
It was an atypical pardon from an atypical president. When President Donald Trump granted his very first pardon to Arizonan former sheriff Joe Arpaio, he bucked process and precedent by circumventing the Department of Justice's unit dedicated to making recommendations on such requests. But he also bucked decades of precedent for how recent pardons have nearly always been granted: a majority have come in the last year of a president's term, they usually come in groups of a dozen or more and they cancel convictions averaging more than two decades old.
Trump's pardon of Arpaio marks one of the earliest pardons in a president's term and one of the only pardons granted alone, according to a CNN analysis of Department of Justice data ranging back nearly three decades. And we turned that data into a chart that shows how, historically, this pardon sticks out in all three major areas: numbers of years into a president's term, number of pardons issued at once and time since the conviction or sentencing.
From FiveThirtyEight here, "The Arpaio Pardon Has Plenty Of Precedents … That Got Other Presidents In Trouble":
Was President Trump’s pardon of former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, issued on a Friday night as a deadly hurricane barreled toward the Gulf Coast, unprecedented? Or just unpopular?
Several political allies and foes immediately condemned the move as inappropriate and an insult to the justice system. But most of the criticized characteristics of Arpaio’s pardon have at least some parallels to previous ones. The number of controversial characteristics of the Arpaio pardon, however, is unusual and raises questions about the political fallout that Trump will face. The Arpaio pardon, in other words, does have historical precedents (as Trump said on Monday) — just not good ones.
Recent prior related posts:
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