What’s the benefit of a pardon here, exactly? Does their formal criminal record vanish? Presumably any fines still unpaid are no longer due. What about fines that they have already paid?
Yeah, I’m not seeing any reason for a pardon.
I found this well done article about the entire story from end to end. Well worth reading:
One of the odder things are these paragraphs:
“…Once he determined the balloon was airtight, Richard covered the sheets with aluminum foil to help conduct the electricity that would propel the balloon…he emptied five tanks of helium into the balloon on October 15, it expanded and began to take the shape of a Jiffy Pop popcorn container. Richard then hooked a stun gun to the basket and ran a million volts of electricity across the balloon’s surface. The plan was to tether the balloon to the ground, release it about 13 feet into the air, and then use the electricity to maneuver the balloon.”
I wonder how that was supposed to work?
Seconded. There are good reasons to pardon people after they have served their sentences but that is usually for cases were there was a miscarriage of justice, either the person was actually innocent of the crime or the law they were convicted of breaking was a bad law. That doesn’t appear to be the case for this couple. It was a fair cop and they deserve to be punished for it.
It makes me wonder if they somehow made a big donation to the governor.
I don’t know the laws of the state they are in, but in some states, felons cannot own property. This means that if the father wants to start buying and flipping houses, he can’t. That’s a reason there for him to doggedly pursue a pardon.
The grounds may well have been that his wife’s confession was made after she was intimidated and denied counsel by police who knew she did not understand them, and failed to provide an interpreter.
I’m not sure what the law was 10 years ago, but now, she needs to have an interpreter. Anyone who does not speak English as a first language needs to explicitly say they don’t want an interpreter. If that protocol isn’t followed, anything they say is likely to be ruled illegally obtained.
Since the mother’s confession seems to be what pushed the ball that last inch it needed to start rolling on its own, if the confession is ruled illegal, then anything obtained as a result of the confession will be thrown out as “fruit of the poisoned tree.” When that happens, a lawyer (usually the prosecutor) has to show another path to discovery that the opposing side would have inevitably taken to find the same information (or physical evidence, whatever).
Maybe the governor thought it was clear that the mother didn’t understand the question of the polygrapher-- or became progressively more and more stressed by having to process questions in English about an emotional subject. Bear in mind, these questions may have seemed more and more accusatory, but she wasn’t sure. Also, she was getting no feedback on her use of English, which she would normally have gotten.
That would make not only her confession inadmissible, but any information they got as a result of having her confession. If the governor’s thinking went along those lines, he may have decided that there was no way there would have been a conviction had she had a interpreter, he could have chosen to pardon them.