Wednesday, December 09, 2015
A chat with a friend
One of the pleasures of middle age is the people who have known you for a long time-- who know you and understand you. They know where you came from. I'm lucky to have many of those people in my life (including some people here on the Razor, like IPLawGuy and Christine).
One of them is Ron Fournier, who has had an incredible career as a White House reporter and journalist. I met him for lunch last week, and the conversation led to his column yesterday. Here is part of it:
FOURNIER: OK. Let’s get the personal disclosure out of the way. Have we ever met before?
OSLER: Yup—we met back when we were scrawny runners, student journalists, and friends in high school. I like to pretend we look pretty much the same now.
FOURNIER: We do. But that’s off the record. So tell me why a former federal prosecutor from Detroit cares so passionately about clemency for convicted drug dealers and users. Why should anybody care about them?
OSLER: I’m still a
prosecutor at heart. Some people are dangerous, and need to be
locked up. But when I was prosecuting young black men for selling
crack, I realized it did not make any difference. We were sweeping
up low-wage labor, people who would be replaced the next day by someone
else selling crack. Their sentences were out of line, too. Low-level,
non-violent drug dealers were getting longer sentences than bank
robbers and those who committed major frauds. We have changed the
laws, but many of those people are still in prison even though they
would be out if they had been sentenced under our current laws,
sentencing guidelines, and policies. Keeping them in prison is a
failure of justice and mercy at the same time. It wastes money, tears
up lives, and solves no problem. As justice issues go, this should be
an easy one, a layup.
FOURNIER: Then why the air balls? Tell me what you want President Obama to do and why you think he hasn’t gotten it done.
FOURNIER: Then why the air balls? Tell me what you want President Obama to do and why you think he hasn’t gotten it done.
OSLER: It’s the same reason that GM can’t fix an ignition switch that kills people: too much bureaucracy and not enough accountability (we Detroit guys can’t stay away from car analogies). He sees the problem. He knows the broad scope of the pardon power, too, since he taught constitutional law for all those years at the University of Chicago. He just refuses to fix a broken system, something he could do with the stroke of a pen on an executive order.
You can read the rest of it here!
