 |
| CBS NEWS/YOUTUBE |
Liz Oyer, DOJ’s former ‘nonpolitical’ pardon attorney, recommended clemency for all 40 federal death row inmates. Biden obliged on 37.
Expect Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats to deliver another crazed production of confirmation theater Wednesday, rolling out every political weapon in their arsenal to try to block Acting AG Todd Blanche’s promotion to U.S. Attorney General.Old, shriveled Dick Durbin, the committee’s ranking member, believes he’s got an ace up his sleeve as Blanche’s confirmation hearing begins Wednesday morning. He’s called Liz Oyer, the Department of Justice’s former “nonpolitical” pardon attorney, to testify. Oyer carries a deep loathing of President Donald Trump and an ax to grind against Blanche.
In a statement released Tuesday, the Illinois senator asserted that Blanche fired Oyer “for refusing to rubberstamp gun ownership rights to Mel Gibson, a convicted domestic violence abuser and friend of Donald Trump.” Yes, that Mel Gibson — actor and director — who had been barred from purchasing firearms following a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction in 2011. Gibson was one of 10 people who received pardons from the Trump administration last year for their decades-old crimes.
Oyer was shown the door after she refused to include Gibson on the list of pardons. Blanche signed the firing memo terminating the pardon attorney’s job.
“I had been asked to recommend restoring the firearm rights of a famous friend of the president who had lost his right to own a gun due to a domestic violence conviction,” Oyer wrote in a self-serving Rolling Stone op-ed. “I declined to do so based on concerns about public safety.”
Oyer didn’t seem to have many concerns about the victims of the 37 convicted killers on federal death row who got a get-out-of-execution card thanks to the pardon attorney’s soft spot for psychopaths. The pardon attorney recommended that then-Attorney General Merrick Garland “encourage” President Joe Biden to “use his clemency power to reassess the 40 remaining federal death sentences through the lens of current policy and practice.”
“Disparity and undue severity of sentence, which are present in many if not all of these cases, have long been recognized as grounds for clemency,” Oyer wrote in a Nov. 4, 2024 memo obtained by The Federalist. “In this context, clemency could take various forms, ranging from the broadest approach of commuting all death sentences, to the narrower approach of considering clemency on a case-by-case basis.”
Clemency Bender
As noted in her memo, the Biden administration had received an “influx of requests” to commute federal death sentences before the autopen president left office less than three months later. Biden, or at least his autopen, saved 37 of the 40 convicts from a kinder death than their victims suffered. They will be wards of the state, ongoing expenses for taxpayers, until the day they die — most likely from natural causes. Unlike their victims.
Biden, or at least his autopen, went on a clemency bender in the final days of a disastrous administration marked by a merciless, weaponized Department of Justice. The former president granted a record number of clemency requests — 4,245, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice. Biden bested every president in the category, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who granted about 550 fewer clemency requests in his 12-plus years in the White House.
And Biden cleaned out most of death row after reinstating the moratorium on federal capital punishment.
In her 73-page memo, Oyer stressed that her fellow death penalty opponents feared “the possibility that executions could quickly resume when a new administration takes office.” The new administration did just that.
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that restored the death penalty in the name of public safety. In the order, he noted Biden’s commutation free-for-all that spared the lives of 37 of the 40 “most vile and sadistic rapists, child molesters, and murderers on Federal death row: remorseless criminals who brutalized young children, strangled and drowned their victims, and hunted strangers for sport.”
‘Blood on their Hands’
But in her memo, Oyer suggested the death row inhabitants shouldn’t have faced capital charges in the first place. Fine folks such as Chadrick Fulks and Brandon Basham, each convicted of murdering 19-year-old Samantha Burns after grabbing her from a mall parking lot in 2002.
“Burns’ murder happened after Fulks and Basham broke out of jail and went on a multi-state crime spree. A woman from South Carolina was also killed during the spree,” WSAZ in West Virginia reported.
Then there are sweethearts like Ricordo Sanchez Junior and Daniel Troya, the dynamic duo behind the 2006 Florida Turnpike murders. They killed a mother, father, and two young children in a “drug-debt” hit.
“Just four and three years old at the time, the boys died wrapped in their mother’s arms,” CBS 12 in Florida reported.
“At no point did the president consider the victims,” Heather Turner, daughter of a woman killed during a bank robbery, wrote on Facebook about Biden. “He, and his supporters, have blood on their hands.”
‘Not a Compelling Candidate for Clemency’--->READ MORE HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment