Conrad Black stood before a federal judge in Chicago to hear his final prison sentence, all that was left of the fraud case against him was a single count. He was given a chance to make a statement. “I never ask for mercy," he told the judge, "but I do ask for avoidance of injustice." It was a sad thing for our country and for newspaperdom, we wrote at the time, that his request was denied.
All the greater the glory today, when President Trump reached for the ultimate tool our Constitution provides for the crafting of justice. The president used his pardon power to void the injustice in a case that should never have been launched. In the constitutional and legal sense, the pardon makes things the same as if Conrad Black had never been convicted at all.
There was never a moment in this case that we doubted Conrad Black’s innocence. Nor was that simply because his company was one of the founding partners in the New York Sun and he one of its founding directors. He’d already sold his interest and resigned from the Sun’s board. Nor was it because — as Humphrey Bogart put it — “he was your partner, and you're supposed to do something about it.”
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