The New York Times
January 27, 2012
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and STEPHANIE SAUL
James Patterson For The New York Times
Wayne Harris, and his bulldog, Hotty Toddy,
outside of Harris' service station on Main Street
in Calhoun City in January. Mr. Harris who served
time on a marijuana conviction was recently pardoned
by outgoing Governor Haley Barbour.
JACKSON, Miss. — On a Saturday night in October 1995, a blue Toyota came
hurtling down the wrong side of a county road in North Mississippi and
crashed head-on into a pickup truck. Scotty Plunk, the driver of the
truck, was killed. The driver of the Toyota, 19-year-old Joel Vann, had
been drinking so much that he did not remember the accident.
Mr. Vann pleaded guilty to “D.U.I.-death,” and in lieu of jail attended a
residential treatment program. This month he was one of 198 people
pardoned by Mississippi’s governor, Haley Barbour, as he left office.
It is unclear what persuaded the governor to pardon Mr. Vann; his
clemency application contains glowing references and a case study. But
the letter to the governor from Mr. Vann’s father, the brother-in-law of
a former Republican state committee member and contributor to Mr.
Barbour, had a familiar tone.
“All is well in Corinth, and as you may know, we have two new Republican
aldermen,” the letter said. It traced Mr. Vann’s path from
rehabilitation through college, marriage and fatherhood before asking
for “your consideration to grant Joel a pardon at the most appropriate
time.”
Amy Plunk, meanwhile, said that her family had never recovered from her
brother’s death. Of the mercy shown Mr. Vann, she added: “The Vanns are
real prominent in the Corinth community. That’s what I suspect.”
In the furor over Mr. Barbour’s pardons — he issued 10 times as many as
his four predecessors combined — beneficiaries like Mr. Vann have been
overshadowed by others with higher profiles. Among them were four
murderers who worked at the Governor’s Mansion and Brett Favre’s
brother, who killed a friend in a drunken-driving accident.
A close look at some of the clemency applications of the nearly 200
others who were pardoned reveals that a significant share contained
appeals from members of prominent Mississippi families, major Republican
donors or others from the higher social strata of Mississippi life.
The governor erased records or suspended the sentences of at least 10
felons who had been students at the University of Mississippi or
Mississippi State when they were arrested, including at least three who
killed people while driving drunk and several others charged with
selling cocaine, ecstasy and other drugs. Another pardon went to the
grandson of a couple who once lived near Mr. Barbour’s family in his
hometown, Yazoo City.
One beneficiary, Burton Waldon, killed an 8-month-old boy in an
alcohol-induced crash in 2001. Mr. Waldon, a high school senior at the
time, pleaded guilty and received a suspended sentence. He is a member
of the prominent Hill Brothers Construction Company family, big-money
political donors who give mostly to Republicans, including Mr. Barbour.
An uncle of Mr. Waldon, Kenneth W. Hill Sr., sought and received a
pardon from President George W. Bush in 2006, erasing a federal income
tax conviction.
Mr. Barbour declined to comment on the pardons, but a spokeswoman said
that every application had been treated alike. “If you were poor or
rich, you were told to go through the parole board process,” said the
spokeswoman, Laura Hipp.
Ms. Hipp said that in roughly 95 percent of the cases, the governor went
along with the majority recommendation of the five-member parole board
he had appointed to review the requests. In some cases, the governor
granted pardons that the board unanimously opposed. Grants of clemency
are solely at the governor’s discretion, and he is not obligated to give
his reasoning.
Many of those pardoned appear to have no special connections. Others
with political ties made persuasive cases that they had led chastened
lives and earned a second chance. Applications contained letters from
pastors, teachers and counselors attesting to genuine redemption.
Yet in a state with the highest poverty rate in the nation, where nearly
70 percent of convicts are black, official redemption appears to have
been attained disproportionately by white people and the well connected.
In some of the appeals for clemency, personal connections to Mr. Barbour
were unabashedly made. “Maggi and I wanted to begin by thanking you and
Marsha for a lovely and special lunch at the Mansion last Tuesday,”
began a letter to the governor by a family friend of Doug Hindman, one
pardon applicant. “It was very interesting to see the historical quilt
upstairs.”
Mr. Hindman, the son of a cardiologist from Jackson, was arrested in
2006 after exchanging hundreds of sexually explicit messages with an
undercover officer posing as an under-age girl.
The historical inequities in Mississippi justice have been chronicled by
journalists and fictionalized by novelists from Faulkner to Grisham.
Even today, prison terms for the same crime can vary significantly from
one part of the state to another.
Mississippi’s pardon system, like those in other states, rewards
applicants who have both the financial means and the connections to seek
reprieves aggressively. According to the parole board, the board
reviewed slightly more than 500 pardon applications during Mr. Barbour’s
two terms in office, and he granted some form of clemency more than 40
percent of the time.
Many of the applications contain the type of recommendations that a poor
person could be hard-pressed to collect: character references from
state legislators or local elected officials.
In impoverished Tallahatchie County, Kenneth Byars provides a case in
point. He is serving 33 years in prison for growing eight pounds of marijuana. Mr. Byars has been in custody for 14 years, and his earliest possible release date is 2018.
He filed for a pardon a decade ago, but said he never received a reply.
The cost — nearly $1,000 and paid by his mother — kept him from
reapplying this time. “My momma doesn’t get nothing but a little Social Security check,” Mr. Byars said. “I wasn’t going to put that on her again.”
Sheriff William Brewer of Tallahatchie County, who supports Mr. Byars’s release, said that Mr. Byars lacked an advocate.
The pardon application itself is simple, according to Hiram Eastland
Jr., a lawyer in Greenwood, Miss., who said that everyone had access to
the system. Even so, Mr. Eastland said that it was preferable to have a
lawyer.
Mr. Eastland, a cousin of James O. Eastland, the powerful Democrat who
served as a United States senator for 36 years until his retirement in
1978, handled three petitions, including that of Wayne Harris, a
convenience store owner from Calhoun City who said he had difficulty
coming up with the money to pay Mr. Eastland’s fee, which he said was
$10,000. Like Mr. Byars, Mr. Harris was sentenced on a marijuana charge.
Mr. Harris received letters from both the sheriff-elect and the mayor,
and his petition proved successful.
Mr. Eastland’s two other clients — both serving time on murder charges —
did not receive pardons, a fact that Mr. Eastland said proved that Mr.
Barbour was not playing favorites.
“I know his heart,” Mr. Eastland said. “He’s really sincere when he says
people deserve second chances. He granted one and denied two, as close
as we are.”
In other cases, applicants relied on someone who had the connections
they lacked. The file of one man, who had participated in the gang rape
of a 17-year-old in 1976 , included a reference letter from his
employer, a large donor to Mr. Barbour and other Republicans.
The applicant received a pardon, as did two young men who robbed a
grocery store at gunpoint in 1997. While their post-prison lives appear
to be commendable — one is studying for a degree in mechanical
engineering at Ole Miss — their petition was reinforced by a letter from
Bob Dunlap, a major donor to the Republican Party.
“Please tell Uncle Haley that one of my few talents is my ability to
judge people,” read the letter on their behalf, sent to one of Mr.
Barbour’s nephews at his lobbying firm in Jackson.
The victims of the crimes are unmoved by these interventions.
“As for my family,” wrote one woman in a hand-written letter to the parole board, “we as a family say no forgiveness.”
She was referring to Eldridge Bonds, known as Bubba, who in 2003 pleaded
no contest to forcible sexual battery of her 14-year-old daughter in
the field house of South Panola High School, where he was a popular
assistant coach.
Mr. Bonds, who said in an interview that he regretted agreeing to the
plea deal, included in his clemency application dozens of letters
praising his character. Some were from family friends, others from
former colleagues at South Panola and one, dated 2003, from the dean of
the University of Mississippi’s School of Education, who said “anybody
who knows Bubba does not believe that he would have ever done what the
student said he did.”
Mr. Bonds pointed out in his own letter that he was the nephew of “one
of the largest cotton farmers in Mississippi,” Don Waller, who also
wrote a letter on his behalf. Mr. Waller is the brother of William L.
Waller, a former governor who died in November.
John Champion, the district attorney, said that knowing Mr. Bonds’s
family, “I suspected all along that they were going to attempt to get
him a pardon.” He added, “I know that he has political connections.”
The parole board voted unanimously against his pardon, but Mr. Bonds was
granted one nonetheless. “She don’t want to talk about it,” said the
father of the girl at the center of the case.
Of all the pardons issued by Mr. Barbour, the case involving Harry R. Bostick, first disclosed by a blogger in Oxford, Miss., Tom Freeland, may be the most confounding.
Mr. Bostick, a former criminal investigator for the I.R.S., was
sentenced in May 2010 for his third drunken driving offense — a felony —
and ordered into treatment.
Several former government lawyers and law enforcement officers who
worked with him on federal tax prosecutions submitted letters on his
behalf. In one, a former United States attorney, Jim Greenlee, argued
that Mr. Bostick had reversed his destructive course of conduct. “He now
fits the criteria and meets the human factors that make his pardon a
wise decision,” Mr. Greenlee wrote.
In October, Mr. Bostick, 55, was arrested again for drunken driving,
this time in an accident that left an 18-year-old waitress dead. The
waitress, Charity Smith, was working at Cracker Barrel to save money for
college. On a Friday night, her Buick collided with Mr. Bostick’s
truck.
Mr. Bostick was charged with his fourth D.U.I. On Jan. 10, he was pardoned for his prior felony D.U.I. by Mr. Barbour.
“What Haley Barbour has done has just killed us,” said Mary Ruth Ellis,
83, a neighbor and surrogate grandmother to Ms. Smith, a painter and
writer. “Why was that man on the road? This is the failure of our law
enforcement, in my opinion.”
