SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Statement from the Press Secretary Regarding Executive Grants of Clemency
Anthony Levandowski – President Trump granted a full pardon to Anthony Levandowski. This pardon is strongly supported by James Ramsey, Peter Thiel, Miles Ehrlich, Amy Craig, Michael Ovitz, Palmer Luckey, Ryan Petersen, Ken Goldberg, Mike Jensen, Nate Schimmel, Trae Stephens, Blake Masters, and James Proud, among others. Mr. Levandowski is an American entrepreneur who led Google's efforts to create self-driving technology. Mr. Levandowski pled guilty to a single criminal count arising from civil litigation. Notably, his sentencing judge called him a "brilliant, groundbreaking engineer that our country needs." Mr. Levandowski has paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good.
Wikipedia entry on pardon within the United States.
See also: Former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski among list of last-minute Trump pardons
Trump's last-minute pardons include Bannon, Lil Wayne and scores of others
Trump Reportedly Abandoned Pardons For Snowden And Assange
Trump declines to pardon Assange, Snowden, or 'Joe Exotic' – here's the 143 people he chose
Previously: Text Messages Between Uber's Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski Released
The Fall of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick
Uber Shutting Down Self-Driving Truck Division
Ex-Uber Engineer Levandowski Pleads Guilty To Trade Secrets Theft
Uber Accuses Levandowski of Fraud, Refuses to Pay $179M Google Judgment
Ex-Googler Levandowski Gets 18 Months in Prison for Trade-Secret Theft
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2021, @11:08PM (23 children)
That a president can just go ahead and pardon crimes to their own liking is completely f'ed up. There is no control on that power at all. The only thing preventing them from doing dumb shit is their own decency, which 45 lacked completely.
At the very least, there should be a restriction that crimes that are pardoned cannot have been committed during their own tenure. Without such a restriction, the president can 'instigate' and condone crime from which they profit. At the very least, the very, very least, make it so that they can pardon crimes committed during the period that ended at the end of administration - 1.
Imagine if all those people who stormed the capitol would be pardoned, that'd be madness...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2021, @11:11PM (7 children)
> The only thing preventing them from doing dumb shit is their own decency, which 45 lacked completely.
Then why didn't he pardon himself?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2021, @11:19PM (1 child)
While I am not a legal scholar - and I will venture, neither are you - I do believe that those who actually are legal scholars have opined that this would not hold water for a variety of reasons. Not being the judge in your own case, would be one of them.
It's not for lack of trying though, he may not have actually pardoned himself, he did investigate whether or not he could.
Another thing to keep in mind is that a pardon implies guilt. In other words, pardoning ones self would imply that he is guilty of ... whatever he'd pardon himself for.
Now all that being said, there is nothing forcing a president to disclose pardons, nor must a president file the pardon paperwork. A president can pardon someone without ever telling anyone else (including the pardoned/pardonee(?)). So given the lack of decency in individual #1, I wouldn't be so sure that he didn't just sign a piece of paper that reads "I pardon myself from everything, anywhere, anytime because I am the best thing that has ever happened to this universe" and just keeps that on his person.
As I said: we don't know because with this vacuum of decency, you never know; and be honest, it wouldn't surprise you if he did exactly the thing I mentioned above.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2021, @11:22PM
I am a legal scholar, and it was because he is already pardoned due to his CI work.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday January 20 2021, @11:39PM (2 children)
Don't you catch yourself wondering how things got to the point when you have to ask that about the guy who used to be your president?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2021, @11:53PM
Nope, every president seems to be a criminal afaict.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday January 21 2021, @07:07PM
Absolutely: One bit of fallout that should be coming from the last US administration is that presidents are far too difficult to remove from power and hold accountable for their actions. As in, once elected, the president only needs the support of 34 senators to remain in power, even if the rest of the country wants him gone. And as a matter of national policy, the US law enforcement agencies decided back in 1973 that sitting presidents could not be charged with crimes while they were president, which I'm sure pleased then-president Richard Nixon, known crook, quite a bit.
Contrast that to Westminster-style systems, where a simple majority of MPs can oust a prime minister with a no-confidence vote, and then they can be up on charges. That's not completely foolproof and certainly not without its flaws, but it means that former Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu is facing charges for taking bribes while PM, while in the US we had a president openly getting all sorts of bribes including from foreign countries and so far at least faced no consequences other than a fatter wallet for it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by c0lo on Wednesday January 20 2021, @11:47PM (1 child)
Because it would have been an admission of guilt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2021, @11:56PM
It may well have also been a political calculation.
Pardoning himself would likely have seriously pissed off many R senators, perhaps making them more likely to vote to convict after the impeachment trial, which would be closely followed by a vote to disallow Trump from holding federal office again.
The former requires a 2/3 majority, the latter a simple majority.
Do I know that's the case? No. But it's certainly food for thought.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2021, @11:14PM (1 child)
May there be one good thing coming from this: once you've been pardoned, you can no longer take The Fifth, as you cannot incriminate yourself anymore (since you've been pardoned). So either you sing like a bird, or you get hit with contempt (under a new president that won't pardon you for /that/).
So all of 45's cronies that got pardoned, let's wheel them in and make them sing...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 21 2021, @01:29AM
Yes, your honor, I realize that I cannot plead the 5th. Unfortunately, I banged my head when I fell in the shower, and I can't remember a thing.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2021, @11:20PM (1 child)
It's better to have an absolute pardon power than not. If anything, there should be many more people getting pardoned.
If the crime is truly heinous, the pardoned will face consequences outside the justice system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 21 2021, @04:27PM
Show me how well or poorly folks like Stone, Mannaford, and Bannon will be doing in 5 years time and tell me again about those 'consequences'...
I agree that this should be the case, what I'm saying is that it isn't!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 21 2021, @12:02AM
You can go back in time and take your argument up with Mr. Hamilton [yale.edu].
(Score: 5, Informative) by Grishnakh on Thursday January 21 2021, @03:17AM (8 children)
To be fair, Trump was pretty decent with many of those pardons. I looked through some of the list, and there were a fair number of people there who had their sentences commuted by him for nonviolent drug crimes. These people had ridiculously long sentences, in the decades, for completely non-violent crimes involving drugs (some just MJ). These sentences were a miscarriage of justice, plus a massive waste of prison resources and money.
The whole reason the pardon exists is to help correct miscarriages of justice like these. So, of course, this points out (given the huge number of pardons handed out by every President) that the "justice" system in this country is largely a farce, especially when it comes to drug crimes. Maybe we should try actually fixing this, instead of putting a band-aid on it with these pardons?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 21 2021, @03:28AM
Glad they weren't all war criminals.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 21 2021, @06:15AM (1 child)
No! How dare he pardon all those convicted under the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Crime_Control_and_Law_Enforcement_Act [wikipedia.org]
Does he not know some Senators worked VERY hard writing that legislation!
Senators like... Joe Biden! and.... Joe Biden!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 21 2021, @05:27PM
True, but at least Biden is capable of saying he made a mistake. Some types of people double down on their bad ideas.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 21 2021, @08:58AM
What's rarely mentioned is that these non-violent drug crimes are quite often just the charges that the accused has pled down to. Because the prosecutors know it'll be difficult to prove the assault charges because witnesses will be afraid to show up, or they still haven't found the body that they're pretty sure the accused murdered, etc. But the cops found the drugs on the accused, and the drugs are in a baggie on the desk in the courtroom so even a jury will understand it, and they don't need much more than that. So the defense attorney advises the accused to plead on the drug charges in exchange for all the other stuff being dropped.
So yeah, the sentence may appear absurdly long for the charge they pled to, but the judge knows about all the other stuff, and how many other times the person has been in court and sent to jail already and doesn't seem to be getting the hint, so gives those very long sentences to keep a very bad person off the street. Sure in the Platonic world of pure justice the sentence should only be for the charge pled to, but we're in this dirty and grimy world instead.
I'm not saying that these particular people who were pardoned were like this; I don't know. But you don't know either. I doubt even the president knew, he just looked through the ones his staff put in front of him and picked some.
(Score: 2) by SunTzuWarmaster on Thursday January 21 2021, @07:30PM (1 child)
Pardons are not for the innocent. Full stop. Innocent people go free. Full stop.
In places where the President believes that justice has either been (a) served, or (b) miscarried - they can correct it. The founders, recognizing that a bad law could be created which created guilty people justly convicted - designed a release valve. One person can overturn the sentence - with that knowledge broadcast to all. Trump did just this.
This also creates a pressure on the legislature to re-write laws that generate pardons (looking at you - "decades for a drug charge"), and a pressure on the president to pardon crimes which no longer exist (looking at you - "drug charges no longer carry this penalty"). Pardons are part of the system - and a good part. Pardons create a pressure on the system for fixing.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2021, @02:00AM
There is an old saying among prosecutors that plea bargains are for the innocent, and according to SCOTUS actual innocence is a mere technicality and not grounds for appeal. Judges have been caught selling kids to private prisons. The innocent should go free, but often don't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 21 2021, @11:51PM (1 child)
Many of them were likely victims of the Clinton / Biden crime bill.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2021, @04:50AM
Ben Gauzy! Buttery males!
Guess you found your joke for the next 4 years
(Score: 2) by rigrig on Thursday January 21 2021, @02:25PM
I would think presidential pardons are meant as ultimate fixes for cases where the legal system failed somehow because of exceptional circumstances, precisely that will break if you start adding restrictions.
The president is supposed to wield a lot of power, if he can't be trusted with pardons I'd say you have way bigger problems.
No one remembers the singer.