Op-Ed: Great start, Mr. President. Bring on more mass pardons.
You’ve had a pretty good start, Mr. President. You pardoned the wrong man, commuted the sentence of the wrong man, and the First Lady gave a speech that got as many retweets as a Donald Trump tweet. You can’t just tweet! She’s a first lady!
You’ve also pardoned the wrong man. We know who you pardoned, Mr. President, because it wasn’t the man who had been sentenced to 25 years in prison, because it wasn’t the guy who’d been sentenced to 20 years in prison, and because of this video of your First Lady talking about how she’d been moved to tears by his story.
Instead, Mr. President, your pardon was for a man who is not even a citizen to begin with: Robert “Bobby” Ray Clemmons.
You know him as the man who was convicted of two felonies, including one for killing a woman, and then escaped his prison cell, killing the guard and taking over guard duties at the prison.
You know about all three of those crimes from the news:
The woman he killed was a single mother of five.
He had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for killing her.
He escaped his prison by climbing out a window.
You pardoned him.
Well, that’s not quite true.
You know that Clemmons had two prior felony convictions, because he was convicted and sentenced for those crimes back in 1992.
But the press doesn’t report that, because they’re so focused on your two criminal pasts that they can’t get a straight story straight when a politician like yours, Mr. President, goes on national TV and claims to have ‘pardoned’ a guy who was not even convicted of those crimes. It makes the press spin into a million pieces. ‘But Mr.