When considering whether to offer a recommendation for a posthumous pardon to legendary heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, how much investigation is required?
On October 18, 1912, Johnson was arrested on the grounds that his relationship with Lucille Cameron violated the Mann Act against “transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes” due to her being a prostitute. Cameron, soon to become his second wife, refused to cooperate and the case fell apart. Less than a month later, Johnson was arrested again on similar charges. This time the woman, another prostitute named Belle Schreiber with whom he had been involved in 1909 and 1910, testified against him, and he was convicted by a jury in June 1913. The conviction was despite the fact that the incidents used to convict him took place prior to passage of the Mann Act. He was sentenced to a year and a day in prison.
Johnson skipped bail, and left the country, joining Lucille in Montreal on June 25, before fleeing to France. For the next seven years, they lived in exile in Europe, South America and Mexico. Johnson returned to the U.S. on 20 July 1920. He surrendered to Federal agents at the Mexican border and was sent to the United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth to serve his sentence. He was released on July 9, 1921
The problem was that these women were white and Jack Johnson was black. I don’t think it should take more than an afternoon or two to draw up the briefs justifying a pardon. But the DOJ doesn’t have the time.
“It is the department’s position that the limited resources which are able to process requests for Presidential clemency — now being submitted in record numbers — are best dedicated to requests submitted by persons who could truly benefit from a grant of the request,” wrote DOJ attorney Ronald Rodgers.
Lame.
link
“Lame” does not begin to describe it. I thought DoJ was bad under Bush and by golly they are getting worse.
Can’t the President just decide to do this? Why go through the bureaucracy? OTOH, if DOJ were to pardon all the dead minority victims of America’s excuse for rule of law it would indeed have time for nothing else. Why should celebrity pardons take priority?
that’s what DOJ is basically forcing Obama to do.
What’s lame about it? They do this one and they will have a trail of dead people’s relatives lining up for all the bs that has been done in the past 20 years.
You obviously haven’t read up on the case(meaning the pardon part) … hell .. even Cranky McSame(I believe .. if not him .. some other high profile Republicans) was/were for it .. and were pushing it
.
Politicians seized upon the “crisis” for political gain. Edwin W. Sims, the U.S. district attorney in Chicago, claimed to have proof of a nationwide white slavery ring:
The legal evidence thus far collected establishes with complete moral certainty these awful facts: that the white slave traffic is a system operated by a syndicate which has its ramifications from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean, with ‘clearinghouses’ or ‘distribution centers’ in nearly all of the larger cities; that in this ghastly traffic the buying price of a young girl is from $15 up and that the selling price is from $200 to $600… This syndicate is a definite organization sending its hunters regularly to scour France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Canada for victims. The man at the head of this unthinkable enterprise is known among his hunters as ‘the Big Chief.’
… The Supreme Court repeatedly held these prosecutions to be constitutional. In United States v. Bitty (1911), the Court ruled that the 1907 Immigration Act applied in the case of a man, John Bitty, who had brought his English mistress into the United States. Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote in the opinion that “the words, ‘or for any other immoral purpose,’ after the word ‘prostitution,’ must have been made for some practical object. Those added words show beyond question that Congress had in view the protection of society against another class of alien woman other than those who might be brought here merely for purposes of ‘prostitution.'”
Two years later, in Hoke v. United States, the Supreme Court held that the Mann Act did not unconstitutionally limit the right of free travel. In Wilson v. United States (1914), the Court declared that travel across state lines with the intention to commit an immoral act was grounds for conviction, even if the immoral act was not executed.
The Supreme Court dramatically widened the scope of the Mann Act three years later in Caminetti v. United States. In March of 1913 Drew Caminetti, the son of a prominent California politician, and a friend, Maury Diggs, both married and having affairs, took their mistresses by train from Sacramento to Reno. Their betrayed wives tipped off the police, and both men were arrested upon their arrival in Reno. Caminetti and Diggs were tried and found guilty. On appeal, Caminetti’s lawyer argued that the intent of Congress was to target only “commercialized vice,” and that while his client’s behavior may have been immoral, it was “free from commercialism and coercion.” Citing Bitty, Justice William R. Day wrote for the majority that the language of the Act “being plain… is the sole evidence of the ultimate legislative intent” and that not applying the law in this case “would shock the common understanding of what constitutes an immoral purpose.”
In 2004 – Mr. President, Pardon Jack Johnson
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
I don’t find it lame at all.
I can’t get agitated about the pardon of a now dead victim of our society.
Let them spend a little time investigated a living victim of their own, because the FBI always get their man, and get him (or somebody) good.
For the murder of two agents at the Pine Ridge Reservation; Leonard Peltier went to prison in 1977, and cannot expect to be free again until October 2040.
Our race problems go way beyond Africans and Arabs, but we sure do know how to create martyrs.
They are probably worried about the optics of a black President issuing a pardon for a black man. Pissant cowards.
Yep. One thing I’m pretty sure black folks have learned is that sticking up for other black folks gets you shunned or worse by almost all white folks.
Thank gawd for a few, like Ali, who told us white folks as a group to go eff ourselves with that behavior.
I disagree. Where would you draw the line? This isn’t one case – this is one of millions.
Really. Make a pile of the millions of cases of dead black men wrongfully convicted and pardon them all in the second term. Do it during black history month and make a big speech like Reagan did over the internment of the Japanese during WWII. Dedicate a monument on the national mall, even.
If there are any living people wrongfully convicted, they really should get priority.
What am I saying? A monument on the mall? How about a new ginormous Smithsonian Museum Building dedicated to the the unjust persecution of black men since (before) our nation’s founding. I doubt you could even fit examples of all the ways its been done through our history in the place. But it’s long overdue. Perhaps even some reparations to the families of the wrongfully convicted black men would be in order.
He’s dead already – he can be pardoned now or, say, late in 2016 to the same effect and without any political blow-back.
A pardon is not appropriate. A pardon implies guilt that is excused. The case was clearly ex post facto and the conviction should be overturned, not pardoned, because there is no guilt to pardon.
Are you trying to tell me that not a single one of the Liberty University Law School grads could not be put on this full time?
Why that evil little believer Monica Goodling could be brought in on a contract basis. She could, also, be forced to find every single one of those simply evil bastards that she buried in the justice department.