Pardoner-In-Chief Endangering Citizens’ Lives

Pardoner-In-Chief Endangering Citizens’ Lives

• 4/01/2016
  

Law and Disorder: Gitmo terrorists aren’t the only prisoners President Obama is pardoning. He is also commuting the life sentences of major drug dealers in record numbers, despite the clear and present danger that many of them pose to U.S. citizens.
Obama pardoned another 61 prisoners Wednesday, bringing the total number of felons whose sentences he has commuted to 248 — more than all the previous six presidents going back to Gerald Ford combined.
And he is not done yet.
More than 10,000 clemency cases are pending, and the president has made approving them his “top priority” in his remaining days in office.
“Clemency of individual cases alone cannot fix decades of overly punitive sentencing policies,” his White House counsel, Neil Eggleston, said. “So while we continue to work to resolve as many clemency applications as possible — and make no mistake, we are working hard at this — only broader criminal justice reform can truly bring justice to the many thousands of people behind bars serving unduly harsh and outdated sentences.”
Obama claims that none of the felons he is putting back on the streets is a serious offender. But 92 of them — or nearly 40% of the total pardoned so far — were serving life sentences. So they’re hardly the “low-level” or “non-violent” criminals that he claims.
Almost all of them are crack dealers who have also committed gun crimes. These are dangerous thugs whom judges and juries decided should never be out on the streets again. They were supposed to be locked up for good.
At the same time, the Obama regime has also approved the early release of roughly half — more than 46,000 — of all drug traffickers in the federal pen, including the kingpin of a multimillion-dollar operation that smuggled drugs from Canada to Maine.
Already some of these inmates who had their sentences retroactively slashed have been rearrested — including at least one for triple homicide. So why is the White House celebrating this reckless mass clemency? And why aren’t Republican leaders, both in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail, raising alarms?
Just last month, a convicted crack dealer who left prison early as part of the Obama administration’s mass release of federal inmates was indicted in connection with the triple murders of his ex-girlfriend and her two young daughters, ages 7 and 10. Wendell L. Callahan, 35, allegedly broke into their Columbus, Ohio, apartment and brutally and fatally stabbed all three victims, while seriously injuring a fourth person.
Callahan should have been in jail when the crimes occurred, but he was released several years early, thanks to Obama’s sympathy for crack dealers.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for the heinous crime, which also involved burglary, so this time there will be no chance for clemency.
This sudden outrageous leniency afforded crack dealers is part of Obama’s crusade to “reform” the nation’s criminal justice system as a way of ending alleged racial discrimination in policing and sentencing, even though federal studies dispute charges of racial bias in law enforcement.
Over the next several years, long after Obama is gone, wave after wave of drug dealers, many of them members of violent gangs, will flood American streets — including in the U.S. capital, where drug-related shootings are on the rise again.
Meanwhile, Obama has instructed prosecutors to go easy on new drug offenders. What message are drug traffickers and drug cartels hearing from this newfound leniency? That the streets of America are open for business again.
Yes, many criminals deserve a second chance — but only after they’ve paid their full debts to society. By rewarding thousands of felons with get-out-of-jail cards, Obama is threatening public safety.
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/pardoner-in-chief-endangering-citizens-lives/