Presidential Pardon request

Warren G. Lilly, Jr.
DOC # 447655
NLCI, P.O. Box 4000
New Lisbon, WI 53950

President George Bush
White House
Washington D.C.

Open request for Presidential pardon and executive order

Dear Mr. President,

I am Warren Gamaliel Lilly, Jr., further information pertinent to who I am, that explains my situation and stance, is appended to this request. I come to you as a supplicant in the name of destitute Americans who need your help, and as, I believe, an accurate and a timely indicator of this nation’s need for the healing gesture I’m soliciting.

What I’m asking and why

At the end of each president’s term in office comes a time of reflection when he considers the impact of his presidency on America. Traditionally this has been the time when Presidents looked to closing the rifts and healing the wounds of the nation.

One way Presidents have done this was to issue pardons to Americans who have been imprisoned but the circumstances of their situation cry out for redress. I write this letter to implore you to continue this tradition and to take it a step beyond what your predecessors have done. I am asking you to release from prison, by Presidential pardon, all Americans imprisoned for nonviolent social conflicts, and to issue an executive order removing the use of federal funds for the imprisonment of nonviolent Americans.

America’s justice system has come to reflect not the best aspects of our nation’s character but its worst. It is one of the last hold outs of institutionalized racism and classism. It boasts racially biased statistics that should any other country have produced them would result in America’s cries for actions against it. Yet when those same statistics come before state and federal congresses silence punctuated by halfhearted rumblings is their only response to them.

Fear of the appearance of being soft on crime prevents law makers from acknowledging the reality that the current laws and their targeted application have definite immoral and un-American biases and tend to victimize those least capable of defending themselves against unjust laws.

As a statistical example consider that the prison population of Wisconsin, a state with a Black population of less than six percent and a white population of around ninety percent, consist of fifty percent black prisoners and only forty-five percent white. Statistically, this implies that Wisconsin blacks are sixteen (16) times more criminal than its whites, and when just the age group eighteen to thirty is considered that comparison goes up to twenty (20) times more criminal. Only the impact of racism in Wisconsin’s justice system accurately explains this statistical improbability - a holocaustic misapplication of law.

Yet Wisconsin is not atypical among the states. Across this country similarly biased statistics can be gleaned from the so-called application of justice against the minorities, the mentally ill, and the illiterate.

Most distressing is the increasing application of imprisonment for nonviolent social conflicts especially when the rate of violent social conflicts, since the early eighties, has been decreasing. At a time when America should have been decreasing its prison population it, instead, turned to the nonviolent to continue the pernicious growth of its prison industry.

Why the pardon and edict should be issued.

America, which proudly boasts of the freedoms of its people, has the distinct dishonor of being the world’s largest imprisoner of its citizens. At only five percent (5%) of the world’s population, America holds twenty-five percent (25%) of the world’s prisoners, no so-called rogue state comes near that shameful statistic.

Some estimates hold that seventy to eighty percent of those imprisoned are nonviolent. What then is the basis upon which we project our vaunted respect for individual freedoms when in no other country are the nonviolent more likely to be imprisoned?

American politics has hoisted itself upon the petard of being ‘tough on crime’, a politically defined moral stand that has inevitably lead to an intractable and socially devastating position. It is now impossible for those who realize the tragic error of that stance to make public their retraction as fear mongers await to paint them as ‘soft on crime’.

A pardon and executive order would remove that self-imposed yoke and give voice to those who wish to end the current Draconian laws and replace imprisonment with fiscally responsible humanistic alternatives. It would remove the fear of doing right by legislators who’ve long since recognized the wrong, the societal harm of abusive over imprisonment. It wold begin to untie the hands of judges who have no tool except imprisonment to deal with social conflicts. It would end the growth of a prison system that has proven to be both ineffective and destructive to the moral, social, and economic well-being of this nation.

The justice system cannot correct itself, it has lost sight of its purpose, there is no humanity within it from which the impetus for reform can spring. Without a drastic reduction it can no longer be controlled to meet the needs of a progressive, human-centered society. Its politically tainted existence mocks America’s claim of respect for individual rights and freedoms, reflects the inner darkness of American politics, and highlights America’s resistance to purge from within itself the very systemic horrors over which it has fought wars against other nations.

By issuing the pardon and executive order you give America the beginnings of a chance to clear the ground and buildup a justice system that reflects the cultural and social, not the politically driven, needs of America, and you free Americans from the shackles of 17th century practices against the needs of a 21st century society.

Historical Precedents

There are precedents which support the scope of the pardon and executive order I’m requesting: Presidents, congress, and governors have used pardons, amnesties, clemencies and other acts to heal and to advance the nation past its troubled times, even when the nation itself was ambivalent toward, reticent to , or unmindful of the need for the act.

After the Civil War, despite the fact that the Confederacy had taken up arms against the nation, the confederate soldiers were pardoned because a healing gesture was needed to make the nation whole. Likewise after the Vietnam War American draft dodgers, who’d fled the country rather than fight its war, were offered a conditional amnesty which allowed them to come home from self-imposed exile.

Even a former president has benefited from the need of the nation to be healed of a socially dividing and morally conflicting trauma. President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon for his violation of the public trust was necessary to prevent the possible destruction of the nation’s executive body that could have been caused by a long and detailed trial. The nation benefited far more by that pardon than did Mr. Nixon.

Governors also have acted to heal wounds inflicted upon citizens by unjust laws. A case in point is ex-governor Ryan’s stay of all executions in Illinois to prevent the continuation of the application of an unconscionable racial bias in his state’s death penalty. His action saved the lives of many wrongly sentenced to death, and precipitated the beginning of a closing of the rift between the races and the laws presumed to apply equally to all.

One more precedent, though I admit it’s far of field, is the world changing actions of former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. In responding to then President Ronald Reagan’s call to “tear down that wall” by tearing down the Berlin Wall, and later, of his own accord, implementing the policies of Perestroika and Glasnost, Premier Gorbachev acted to heal the world of its Cold War aches and pains, and by doing so achieved a noteworthy place in history.

Judgment of History

The people who now suffer imprisonment under America’s misguided and politically motivated fear of social conflict must, like the Confederate soldiers and the draft dodgers of the Vietnam era, be forgiven for their transgressions against the nation in order to allow America to be healed of the greater transgression against citizens by a politically fueled justice system.

I call upon you Mr. Bush to echo Mr. Gorbachev’s global healing gesture by tearing down the walls of imprisonment which separate the hundreds of thousands of nonviolent citizens from even the possibility of recovery or rehabilitation. Such a gesture, by its very nature, would cause a new age in America to pivot around your presidency.

When history judges you what will it choose as your crowning moment, your glowing achievement? Let it be the human moment when you reached out to heal the nation of an old, deep, and festering wound caused by the biased and misguided misapplication of justice. Let it be your achievement in making it possible for legislators and judges, across the country, to remove injustice from the backs of those least capable of defending themselves and of restoring to them their human and civil rights, and the blessings of liberty. Let it not be for the opportunity you missed to set America firmly upon a humanistic and progressive path.

Do for the states what political fears will not allow them to do for themselves, what humanity cries out for, give them the way, the opportunity, the moral platform from which they may rescind the established injustices of our current system.

End the nation’s unconscionable waste of the lives of hundreds of thousands , if not millions, of nonviolent Americans. End the collateral damage that this waste imposes upon their loved ones, and end the violation of the government’s duty to enhance the lives of all its citizens.

Make the gesture Mr. Bush for as with Mr. Nixon’s pardon it will be the nation that benefits far more than any prisoner. I implore you to close the rift, heal the wound, wipe the slate, tear down those walls.

With respect and in hope,

Warren G. Lilly. Jr.

cc: To those whom it does concern