I Feel Fine wrote:I think Obama has more important things to do at the moment, but maybe he can sign a pardon during a five minute coffee break, or something. As a boxing fan I would like to see it, though I wonder how many people have been falsely convicted of crimes due to racial bias who will not receive pardons merely because they were not celebrities. That's life, I guess.
Either way, sure, I would not mind seeing it.
- Congressional crooks giving JJ a pardon would be divine irony indeed.
The Mann Act is still on the books and trotted out by federal prosecutors for various sordid crimes. Since JJ was convicted of assisting his ex wife set up a brothel, and other notables including Frank Lloyd Wright and Luis Firpo also suffered from federal application of The Mann Act for merely transporting their girlfriends across state lines, I fail to see the racial bias by application.
Unless you want to pardon every criminal who's existed in the world for false convictions due to claimed racial bias. OJ received a not guilty verdict in his double homicide trial on the basis of racial bias in spite of overwhelming genetic evidence 100x more than the standard used to overturn verdicts of wrongly accused/convicted/sentenced citizens.
This JJ pardon has been kicking around for years and one shudders to calculate the congressional labor costs not to mention the lobbyist costs. It was sponsored by John McCain as part of his losing presidential bid and used to promote the Ken Burns doc and Geoffrey Ward bio.
But after years of proper lobbying efforts of Congress, when all the ducks can be lined up along with all the ceremonial pens with all due pomp and circumstance, of course Obama is gonna make time for a quickie and sign off on this fig leaf.