LJWorld.com

• Email
• iPod-friendly
• Print

Washington — President Clinton ended his tenure Saturday by pardoning 140 Americans, erasing the criminal records of his brother Roger, Whitewater business partner Susan McDougal and 1970s kidnapped heiress Patricia Hearst in a mix of personal and historical acts of clemency.

The orders Clinton signed two hours before leaving office also spared one man from execution and cleared the cloud of scandal from two former Cabinet confidants ex-CIA director John Deutch and ex-housing chief Henry Cisneros.

The list, which included 36 commutations, also was notable for those it did not include:

Leonard Peltier, convicted of killing two FBI agents on an Indian reservation in 1975; Webster Hubbell, a former law partner of Hillary Rodham Clinton convicted in the Whitewater investigation; Jonathan Pollard, a former Navy analyst imprisoned for spying for Israel; and one-time Wall Street financier Michael Milken.

He did, however, pardon fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich, who fled to Switzerland in the 1980s to escape federal charges of financial fraud, tax evasion and racketeering. The Swiss had refused to extradite him.

Clinton, himself spared from indictment in a deal Friday with Whitewater prosecutors, also commuted the prison sentences of 35 people and the death sentence of an Alabama man.

The president spared David Ronald Chandler from being executed in an Alabama drug case in which questions have been raised about his federal conviction for ordering the murder of an associate-turned-informant. Chandler must remain in prison.

Clinton and his staff labored over the pardons some intensely personal, others more traditional for several hours in his final days. They settled on a list in the wee hours Saturday, but the president asked to sleep on it before signing the orders.

One of the final decisions left to be made concerned McDougal, the former business partner who went to prison rather than give testimony about the president sought by Whitewater prosecutors.

McDougal was convicted of fraud along with her ex-husband, the late failed savings and loan owner James McDougal, in a 1996 trial at which Clinton testified by videotape.

Famous names cleared

Roger Clinton, Bill Clinton's under-achieving half brother, was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty in 1985 to conspiring to distribute cocaine.

Roger Clinton has since focused on an entertainment career.

Hearst grabbed headlines in the 1970s when, as a 19-year-old heiress, she was kidnapped by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army. She was later sent to prison for a bank holdup in San Francisco.

Her prison term was cut short by President Carter, but her convictions remained on record until Clinton's pardon.

Deutch's pardon spared the one-time spy chief and top Pentagon official from deciding whether to enter a misdemeanor plea deal in connection with his mishandling of national secrets on a home computer.

Deutch was discussing a possible plea deal with Justice Department prosecutors to settle allegations he mishandled classified information when the pardon muted his case.

He was not alone. Former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington also received a pardon that effectively ends prosecutors' efforts to restore criminal charges against him.

Cisneros was Clinton's first housing secretary. He resigned in 1996 amid an investigation into allegations that he lied to the FBI about payments he made to a former mistress. In 1999, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge.