How is this difficult? *Pollard *made the decisions that caused him to be in jail. Government simply carried out one of its necessary functions by implementing the process.
Yet you’re trying to put the moral onus on “us”, not him. That makes no sense.
It makes perfect sense. We, as a society, should be responsible for the laws we make and the rules we impose, and the penalties we enact for imposing those rules. We shouldn’t fob off our responsibility on the criminal. We should accept responsibility. I don’t get your attitude at all. It almost feels as if there is a basic communications error going on here, as if we are talking past one another.
I don’t think there’s anything WRONG with Pollard’s sentence, or with us for imposing it. It was our responsibility, but not our FAULT. They’re not the same thing.
Yep, just as I thought. Your view of law and justice depends entirely on whether your politics aligns with the accused.
If I had to guess, I’d say the “communications error” derives from your intentional use of a morally charged statement, that “we ruined the life” of someone who was imprisoned for crimes he committed, as you simultaneously shrug and feign indifference that anyone could interpret your phrasing as accusatory, when of COURSE it isn’t, as he fully deserved to have his life ruined by us. We just need to step up to the plate and take responsibility for ruining the life of this man. Who deserved it. But still, we need to admit what we did. Which was the right thing to do. But never forget that it was we who did it to him. And so on, and so on.
Well if we kill a prisoner, what do we call it? “Lifting him up to the pearly gates?”
I think you’ve leapt to a conclusion there, Hargus.
An execution. As in the performance and completion of a process.
And we do - for defining laws and punishments for breaking them, that apply to everyone. The responsibility for an *individual’s *decision to break them, and for the resulting punishment, is his. Pollard ruined his *own *life, “we” didn’t. How is that a difficult concept for you?
What you’ve been blathering here only makes any kind of sense if you think antiespionage laws and sentencing structures are wrong in general, for anyone. But you haven’t said that.
He only thinks espionage laws are wrong for Dick Cheney to break; evidence or no.
Still, there’s the basics of a moral code on display there, some recognition of the need for universal rules and responsibilities. Give him credit for that; it beats the Jingoism Above All crap we see from the country and its people that have chosen to make Pollard a fucking national hero, and a wealthy man too, just because of who he was working for when he chose to commit his crimes. The sentiment “Why not just let him go and make everyone happy” has even been expressed in this very thread, by a person who, sadly but predictably, will not accept responsibility for having said it.
We are toying with semantics.
He was punished to the full extent of the law.
He ruined his life in that he committed the crime, we did it in that we wrote and enforced the law.
You really want an argument that Pollard should be released? Ok, here you go.
Leandro Aragoncillo, who was an analyst with the FBI, is serving a 10 year sentence for passing intelligence to the Phillipines.
Robert C. Kim got ten years for spying for South Korea.
There are a whole bunch of people who were sentenced for espionage, who had done what Pollard did, who got a lesser sentence. Pollard is pretty unique, in that, as far as I know, he’s the only American who spied for a country we have a good relationship with who got a life sentence.
Pollard had entered a plea bargain as part of a deal with the prosecutor, who promised that, in exchange for his pleading guilty, the prosecutor wouldn’t seek a life sentence. The judge imposed one anyway. While it’s the judge’s right to ignore a prosecutor’s sentencing recommendation, it still leaves a slightly bad taste in the mouth that Pollard would be sentenced to the very thing that he was told his guilty plea would prevent.
A declassified CIA report on the damage that Pollard had done reveals that the information Pollard gave to the Israelis wasn’t primarily about US capabilities at all, and that, in fact, Pollard refused to give Israel information about American information about Israeli officials or the names of Israelis spying for the United States. It shows that the information that Pollard passed on to Israel was information about Syrian and Egyptian defense capabilities, communication between the Soviet Union and the Syrian military, the location and analysis of various PLO headquarters, and the Pakistani nuclear program. So the actual damage to the US wasn’t really that great.
True, the Rosenbergs weren’t in prison all that long.
The Rosenbergs were tried 63 years ago.
The Rosenbergs (or Julius, anyway) stole nuclear secrets for the Soviets during World War II. Do you really think thats the same thing in terms of severity?
At the time they were arguably comparable. Pollard’s spying supposedly made it easier for the Soviets to track US missile submarines.
Yes, and we should not pass responsibility for what we have done to Pollard. If the sentence was too harsh, we are responsible. If it was not harsh enough, we are responsible.
If we imprison a man unjustly, we are responsible.
If we write laws that put people in jail for things that are not really crimes (smoking pots, prostituition, etc.) then we are responsible.
If we let our judiciary go after only the weak and powerless and ignore the powerful when they break the law, then we are responsible.
If our criminals leave prison worse human beings than when they entered, then we are responsible.
Therefore, it behooves us to make sure our legislature passes laws that make sense. (We don’t.) It behooves us to make sure our DAs do not abuse their power (some of them do). We do practically nothing to rehabilitate prisoners. It behooves us to make sure that our judicial system goes after the mighty as well as they weak when they break the law (it doesn’t, for the most part ).
If we are lax, if we are stupid, if we are lazy about how we manage the system, it stops being a justice system and becomes just some random series of horrible things that happen to some people and not to others. This makes us look like a bunch of bungling idiots and lessens the moral authority or our justice system. None of us wants that, I’m sure. And the key to preventing it, I think, is for all citizens to take their sense of responsibility seriously, and to respond to the failures of the justice system with a resolve to change it, fix it, make it better. Fobbing the responsibility off on the criminal is a lazy, immoral man’s response.
That’s an inspiring speech, but what does any of that have to do with Pollard, since you agree that he deserved the sentence he got?
You were making a point about supposedly light(er) sentences for Americans caught spying for an allied country. It didn’t help the Rosenbergs’ case that they spied for the Soviet Union (our ally at the time).
Beyond the obvious parallel between the two situations (intelligence passed on that benefited the Soviet Union), Pollard did indeed get a lighter sentence than the Rosenbergs.
Pollard explicitly violated the plea agreement that he signed with the government. Judges tend not to take that kindly. Each of those that you mentioned also had plea arrangements, but I can’t find any evidence whatsoever that they violated their plea agreements.
Do you disagree with the idea that those who violate plea deals should get harsher penalties than those who don’t?
Pollard filed an appeal using this argument and it was rejected twice. The judges in the case (which included now-Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg) found that the prosecutor held up his end of the bargain, in which the Government proposed a “lengthy” and “substantial” prison sentence.
Plus, the Government stood by the plea deal even though Pollard had violated it. The DOJ did Pollard a favor, essentially – and when Pollard doesn’t get to go scot-free, this is now the Government acting unfairly? Talk about perfidy.
Wolf Blitzer related similar information, so one can’t help but believe that the court was aware of the nature of the information that was stolen when sentencing was passed down.