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Source: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Pollards-release-is-a-matter-of-justice-360740
Pollard's Release Is a Matter of Justice
(Jerusalem Post) Alan Dershowitz and Irwin Cotler - President Barack Obama's response to President Shimon Peres's request for executive clemency for Jonathan Pollard was to refer the matter to U.S. Attorney-General Eric Holder. A group of American constitutional and criminal law scholars and practitioners, including six Harvard law school professors, Obama's alma mater, have written to the president requesting the commutation of Pollard's sentence to time served. In our letter we argue that "such commutation is more than warranted if the ends of justice are to be served, the rules of law respected and simple humanity secured." Pollard was charged with, and pleaded guilty to, one count of conveying classified information to a foreign government, in this instance, Israel, an ally of the U.S. The usual sentence for this offense is no more than six or eight years, with actual jail time before release averaging two to four years. Pollard is now serving his 29th year of an unprecedented life sentence. The sentence of life imprisonment was itself a breach of the plea bargain wherein the prosecution agreed not to seek life imprisonment in return for Pollard's guilty plea, his cooperation with the authorities and his agreement to waive his right to trial by jury. Judge Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First District later referred to the government's breach of the plea bargain as a "complete and gross miscarriage of justice." Pollard was also falsely accused of having compromised U.S. security and American lives in Eastern Europe, when it was Aldridge Ames, the head of the CIA's Soviet/Eastern Europe Division, who had himself been both the architect of those treasonable acts, and the original source of the false allegations against Pollard. Irwin Cotler, a member of the Canadian parliament and emeritus law professor (McGill University), is a former minister of justice and attorney-general of Canada. Alan Dershowitz is Professor of Law at Harvard University.