While I think of myself as being in favor of harsh punishment for criminals, I try to restrain this bloodthirsty impulse by remembering that many laws are unjust, all governments are incompetent, and prosecutors often place personal ambition above justice.
And the last point is why I worry about electing people like Rudy Giuliani to high office. There were several reasons why I wasn’t a big fan of the former New York City Mayor, but high on the list was his apparent disregard for the rights of the individual. And I suspect most people who served as prosecutors/district attorneys/U.S. attorneys/etc have a what-could-possibly-go-wrong attitude about proposals to expand the power of government.
With this in mind, I was happy to read that Governor Christie of New Jersey (a former U.S. attorney) has freed a man who was unjustly convicted and imprisoned for a gun offense. My happiness is tempered by the fact that he commuted the sentence of Brian Aitken rather than pardoning him, which is why the governor gets two cheers rather than three.
The important news, though, is that an injustice has been addressed and Aitken is now a free man. Here’s a blurb from a Fox News report.
A man given seven years in prison after being found with two guns he purchased legally in Colorado has had his sentence commuted, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced Monday. The case of Brian Aitken, 27, had become a cause célèbre among gun-rights advocates. …Aitken had purchased the guns legally in Colorado, and he passed an FBI background check when he bought them, according to his father, Larry Aitken. Brian also contacted New Jersey State Police before moving back back to the Garden State to discuss how to properly transport his weapons. But despite those good-faith efforts, Larry Aitken said, Brian was convicted on weapons charges and sent to prison in August. Judge James Morley would not allow the argument in trial earlier this year and Christie later declined to reappoint the judge due to an unrelated case.
