President Obama did his best to show mercy to convicts, issuing pardons to nearly 2,000 non-violent federal offenders during his eight years in office. It isn’t his fault that not all of them made the most of it. But you don’t read every day about a someone getting a presidential pardon and then getting shipped back to prison a year later.
A Texas man whose life sentence on drug charges was commuted by former President Obama is back behind bars after cops caught him with more than two pounds of cocaine following a high-speed chase, according to a report.
The man, Robert Gill, is 68 years old, the New York Post reports. By the time his sentence was commuted, he had been in prison for 25 years on his third minor drug trafficking conviction — surely long enough for what he’d been busted for in 1990.
A year ago last week, the San Antonio Express-News had published a long profile on Gill, a Vietnam veteran who had lost his family and his freedom to what he described as his fondness for the dealer lifestyle.
Gill rediscovered his hometown by riding the bus for hours, relishing the chance to drift after decades of stagnation. He walked around Palm Heights and went past his childhood home. He wandered the aisles at Wal-Mart to gaze at the endless merchandise and to buy fresh produce – avocados in particular – that he missed while behind bars.
“Just the idea that you can head down the street and go to McDonald’s, go to Sonic, go to the grocery store – it’s heaven,” he said. “You have control again. You have choices.”
Every line of the piece is painful to read in light of what he did next. But yes, some people are going to waste their second chance, just like some people waste their first chance.
