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. 


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!

Comments:
shaking the tree branches - good for you!
 
Post a Comment



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

#