Bush Is Urged Not to Pardon Sprinter

[Woodmonkey]

The newly appointed chief executive of USA Track & Field has sent a strongly worded letter to President Bush, asking him not to pardon the disgraced sprinter Marion Jones or commute the six-month jail sentence she is serving for lying to investigators about her use of performance-enhancing drugs and about her role in a check-fraud case.

“Our country has long turned a blind eye to the misdeeds of our heroes,” Doug Logan wrote in an open letter to President Bush. Logan was named chief executive of the sport’s national governing body last week. “If you have athletic talent or money or fame, the law is applied much differently than if you are slow or poor or an average American trying to get by. At the same time, all sports have for far too long given the benefit of the doubt to its heroes who seem too good to be true, even when common sense indicates they are not.

“To reduce Ms. Jones’s sentence or pardon her would send a horrible message to young people who idolized her, reinforcing the notion that you can cheat and be entitled to get away with it. A pardon would also send the wrong message to the international community. Few things are more globally respected than the Olympic Games, and to pardon one of the biggest frauds perpetuated on the Olympic movement would be nothing less than thumbing our collective noses at the world.”

In October, at a federal court in White Plains, Jones pleaded guilty to making false statements to investigators in two cases: the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative doping case that also ensnared her former coach (Trevor Graham) and former boyfriend (Tim Montgomery), and a bank case involving fraudulent checks.

Several days later, she surrendered the five medals — three of them gold — that she won at the 2000 Sydney Games, after taking a regimen of banned substances. She entered federal prison in Fort Worth in March to begin serving her six-month sentence.

Jones is among about 2,300 offenders seeking pardons and commutations during the final months of President Bush’s term in office. Her lawyer, Henry J. DePippo, did not respond to a request for comment.

The letter sent by Logan was a striking departure from the often-timid remarks made by leaders of various Olympic sports federations. It reflected the anger that many antidoping officials felt after Jones called into question the legitimacy of drug-testing procedures before acknowledging that she had taken illicit substances.

President Bush’s decision on Jones’s request will, in some ways, reflect just how serious he was when he called for a crackdown on steroid use in professional sports during his State of the Union Address in 2004.

As the new chief executive of USA Track & Field, Logan, who was commissioner of Major League Soccer from 1995 to 1999, wrote to the president that he had a “moral and practical duty” to argue against Jones’s seeking of a pardon or a commuted sentence.

“With her cheating and lying, Marion Jones did everything she could to violate the principles of track and field and Olympic competition,” Logan wrote. “When she came under scrutiny for doping, she taunted any who doubted her purity, talent and worth ethic. Just as she had succeeded in duping us with her performances, she duped many people into giving her the benefit of the doubt.”

Carl W. Tobias, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Richmond School of Law and who has tracked President Bush’s pardons, said the chances that Jones would receive a pardon appeared “pretty long and may be getting longer,” in light of Logan’s letter.

Tobias said that Bush had been “extremely stingy” in granting pardons, compared with other recent presidents, and that Jones’s high profile could work against her.

“I just think she would somehow be perceived as getting some slack because of who she was,” Tobias said.

“So much attention is trained on her, and maybe that makes it more difficult than if she were someone who is less well known.”

The Source