Begging Your Pardon

Begging Your Pardon: "You can tell which Republican the media thinks is a threat by seeing whom they go after. Besides Sarah Palin, the current target seems to be Haley Barbour. The outrage de jour is over Barbour’s pardon for Gladys and Jamie Scott, two sisters who served as insiders in an armed robbery. Defenders of the Scott sisters routinely emphasize that they got a life sentence for only an 11 dollar robbery. But it was only an 11 dollar robbery because that was all they had. It was still however an armed robbery executed at gunpoint. The second line of argument is the usual “racism of the criminal justice system”. But the victims who testified against them were also black.

With all that in mind, Haley Barbour’s pardon of the Gladys sisters after 16 years and under the current medical context is not unreasonable. His attachment of a condition in which one sister must donate her kidney to the other is more problematic, because it all opens all kinds of doors that should probably stay closed. What happens when inmates are told that a parole board will view them more favorably if they provide an organ donation? It’s not quite China’s gleeful carving up of prisoners for spare parts, but it’s not a million miles away from it either."

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