Pardons ignite indignation

Opinion

January 14, 2012

By Sid Salter, Syndicated Columnist The Picayune Item Picayune Item Sat Jan 14, 2012, 07:10 PM CST

STARKVILLE, Miss. — The national headlines reflect that on the way out the door, former Gov. Haley Barbour pardoned more than 200 Mississippi inmates, including a group of murderers and some high profile convicts who were responsible for the deaths of others through criminal negligence.

Sources in the Barbour camp say the facts are more complex than that. They say all but 26 had already been released from prison. Of that 26, 13 got medical releases and 10 got full pardons. The other three were released under supervision of the Department of Corrections.

But this isn’t a public reaction born out of numbers. It’s a reaction born out of anger and, for many, a sense of betrayal. Newspapers which two days earlier had written glowing farewell editorials about Barbour were questioning his reasoning and his competence in the execution of the pardons. Angry families of the victims were questioning his sanity, his compassion, and his sense of decency.

In that instant, Barbour changed the perception some Mississippians had of him 24 hours earlier. On his last full day in office, the majority of Mississippians saw Barbour as the man who told us to “hitch up our britches” after Katrina and get to work rebuilding. But 24 hours after that, news of the pardons had many of Barbour’s supporters searching vainly for explanations or justifications of the former governor’s actions.

Others reacted by calling for amendment or outright abolition of the powers of pardon and clemency for Mississippi governors. That’s a dangerous and foolhardy overreaction.

Here’s my take on the pardons. While I don’t pretend to understand Barbour’s reasoning on several of the pardons, the majority of them had the sole impact of clearing the records of inmates who had already served their time and been released.

Some of the same national critics of Barbour’s 2012 pardons were stripping the political bark from his back in 2010 over refusing to pardon the Scott Sisters for a heinous 1993 Scott County armed robbery. So to suggest that at least some of the outrage over the Barbour pardons has a basis in partisan politics is unavoidable.

But the suggestion that Barbour’s pardons of criminals who perpetrated “crime of passion” murders of women send a distressing, insulting message to women who survive such crimes is likewise unavoidable.

One other cold hard fact about the Barbour reprieves can’t be avoided: Rich white socialite Karen Irby pleaded guilty in 2010 to manslaughter in connection with the deaths of two doctors, Lisa Dedousis and Daniel Pogue, at a Jackson intersection. Irby was legally drunk at the time of the fiery accident. Barbour gave Irby clemency before leaving office.

But in the 1988 accident that killed House Speaker Philip Gunn’s parents and sister, the poor black driver of the vehicle that collided with the Gunns was also intoxicated at the time of that tragic accident in Oxford. In 1989, Howard Hewlett was convicted on three counts of manslaughter as a habitual offender and sentenced to a total of 60 years in the state prison. Unlike Irby, Hewlett remains incarcerated at Parchman. Exactly what made Irby more deserving of mercy than Hewlett?

I’ve never been a fan of state inmate “trusty” laborers working at the Governor’s Mansion. That’s a vestige of skirting the state’s shameful convict labor and convict leasing practices of the past.

Mississippi needs the check and balance of gubernatorial pardons, clemencies and other reprieves over possible judicial and legislative branch mistakes in the criminal justice system. Governors, any governor, must use those powers with discretion. Haley Barbour’s ultimate legacy will rest in whether voters — after reviewing all the facts — believe he did that or not in these instances.

(Sid Salter is a syndicated columnist. Contact him at 601-507-8004 or sidsalter@sidsalter.com)

Text Only

Opinion

Hood loses hired counsel fight
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
The impact on John Q. Public from the passage of the so-called “sunshine law” regarding the implementation of restrictions and oversight of the hiring of outside counsel attorneys by the Mississippi Attorney General’s office has been vastly overstated by Attorney General Jim Hood and, to a degree, by Hood’s Republican political antagonists who passed the law over his objections.

May 26, 2012
Remembering war dead on Memorial Day
By Wyatt Emmerich/Northside Sun The photo of Billy Elmore has always haunted me. It pops up every now and then as my computer screen rotates through thousands of stored photos.

May 26, 2012
‘Calico Joe’ evokes memories
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
The new “small” novel “Calico Joe” — John Grisham’s much-anticipated paean to the game of baseball — was the perfect traveling companion on a long drive from Mississippi to Fayetteville, Ark., to witness my niece’s graduation from the University of Arkansas last week.

May 19, 2012
Is there a censored race war?
Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist
When two white newspaper reporters for the Virginian-Pilot were driving through Norfolk, and were set upon and beaten by a mob of young blacks — beaten so badly that they had to take a week off from work — that might seem to have been news that should have been reported, at least by their own newspaper. But it wasn’t.

May 19, 2012
The virtues of grunt work
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists
Occasionally a really bad idea gains currency and credibility. Here’s one: College students who work at unpaid internships are unfairly exploited by money-grubbing capitalists. In fact, goes this argument, the whole system is not only immoral but probably illegal and should be abolished.

May 19, 2012
Once, there were no words
By Rhetta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
No matter how many times I stand in front of a group to speak, I get nervous. One of the reasons I went into print journalism was because I figured I’d never have to do any public speaking or wear grown-up clothes.

May 19, 2012
‘Finding Your Roots’ good show
By Cal Thomas/Syndicated Columnist
“Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr.” is another of the Harvard professor’s wonderful television series for PBS. This is “must-see TV” and a more than worthy sequel to three previous projects Gates has hosted about how some of us came to be what and who we are.

May 17, 2012
Moral duties in a muddied world
By Kathryn Jean Lopez/Syndicated columnist
In an election season in which the White House has instituted a policy that puts unprecedented limits on the constitutional right to freedom of religion, questions of conscience, duty and spiritual and moral obligation are of critical importance.

May 17, 2012
Colleges, development intertwined
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
At his speech here to the movers and shakers in the Mississippi Delta’s business, agricultural, educational and political circles, Gov. Phil Bryant’s remarks were met with more than polite applause. Bryant, the mechanic’s son from Moorhead, understands the Delta region’s challenges as lessons from his boyhood.

May 16, 2012
Prolific circuit judge relieved of duty
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun
Relieving the best criminal judge of all his criminal cases is not the way to exercise responsibility as senior circuit judge. What on earth is Hinds County Senior Circuit Judge Tomie Green doing?

May 16, 2012
More Opinion Headlines

Opinion

Search Results

Pardons ignite indignation

Site Map

Contact Us