Governor Douglas chooses not to pardon honored soldier

A former Vermont National Guard member who served in Kuwait – decorated twice by Gov. Jim Douglas – lost his post when a background check found an 18-year-old misdemeanor that prevents him from being a soldier.

Sam Hemingway has written a lenghty article in today’s Burlington Free Press about a 16-year member of the national guard who has lost his post from a case he thought was was closed back in 1992,

when he paid a $10 fine and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of assaulting his wife during a quarrel when they were newly married.

He was wrong.

Thanks to that long-ago offense, the man recently lost his job of 16 years at the Vermont National Guard, a large part of his military pension and the chance to serve his country in Afghanistan.

Hemingway says the soldier has been trying to get his job back ever since.

To that end, six Guard officers have written letters of commendation for him, and three legislators have lobbied on his behalf. Two judges have sympathized with his plight. Chittenden County State’s Attorney Thomas J. Donovan even tried to get the court to throw out the 18-year-old conviction.

What the man doesn’t have is what he needs most: a pardon from Gov. Jim Douglas.

As I read the lengthy story, I wondered:

– What does it take to get a Governor’s pardon?  – How many pardons occur during a Governor’s tenure?

– Has Governor Douglas given similar pardons?

Some of those questions are answered in the comparative chart below prepared by John James of the Burlington Free Press.

pardons,governor,Vermont,national guard,military service,domestic violence

Read the whole story in today’s Burlington Free Press It’s a lot to think about.

What about this soldier passing all previous background checks?

What about his exemplary record?

What about the support of his wife, who was the person who originally filed the complaint the they both thought had been expunged?

What is the contradiction in the fact that this soldier was twice decorated by Governor Douglas, and now cannot even garner a private meeting to plead for his case?

What are your thoughts?

23 thoughts on “Governor Douglas chooses not to pardon honored soldier

  1. A $10 fine for domestic violence? Good god.

    And as we know, it’s far from reassuring in and of itself if the battered spouse says don’t worry, it’s all fine.

    Insufficient data on this for my part. Interesting but not surprising, though, that Douglas is so skimpy on the pardons. Even more interesting, that his skimpiness puts him on the exteme end along with… Kunin?!?! Holy crap.

  2. That has me intrigued.  He only served as gov. for four years and just look at all those pardons!

    There isn’t a lot of information available on Google re:Douglas’pardons.  I did find record of a pardon he issued to one Norma Jeanne Kilburn who was also convicted of simple assault.

  3. If there is only one way to earn a pardon, exemplary military service for 16 years should be the way.  That is all that needs to be said.

  4. for the Dubie brothers:

    The couple said they also asked for – but did not get – help from Maj. Gen. Michael Dubie, the Guard’s adjutant general, and his brother, Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie.

  5. Historically, good behavior, even for long periods of time, after committing a crime doesn’t make the crime “go away.”  Nor is there any evidence that serving (however “honorably”) in the armed services, police, fire department, etc., means that someone no longer commits crimes against a spouse.  

    I think what most of us see is how unfortunate it is that he was allowed to serve, to put himself at risk, to believe he was building a future, and then to have the rug pulled out from under him.  To me, these are two separate problems. If he’s ineligible for service now, he was (presumably) ineligible then, and it seems as if someone was unduly careless not to spot the conviction in a timely manner.  I could support some form of compensation based on his case having been mishandled. The pardon? probably not so much.

  6. Sure, it’s an opportunity to be critical of Douglas, but spouse abuse is a serious crime. Keeping guns out of the hands of spouse abusers is one effective way to keep abuse victims from becoming murder victims.

    Do I know that this guy is going to do it again? No, but the track record for spouse abusers is not good.

    Access to firearms yields a more than five-fold increase in risk of intimate partner homicide when considering other factors of abuse, according to a recent study, suggesting that abusers who possess guns tend to inflict the most severe abuse on their partners.

    Jacquelyn C. Campbell et al., Risk Factors For Femicide in Abusive Relationships: Results From A Multi-Site Case Control Study, 93 Am. J. of Public Health 1089, 1092 (2003), abstract available at

    http://www.ajph.org/cgi/conten

    Of females killed with a firearm, almost two-thirds were killed by their intimate partners. The number of females shot and killed by their husband or intimate partner was more than three times higher than the total number murdered by male strangers using all weapons combined in single victim/single offender incidents in 2002.

    The Violence Pol’y Ctr., When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 2002 Homicide Data: Females Murdered by Males in Single Victim/Single Offender Incidents, at 7 (2004), available at http://www.vpc.org/studies/wmm

    http://new.abanet.org/domestic

  7. we’ll need to build a lot more jails (and we already have way too many for a supposedly civilized society).  We’d need a lot less keys, though, because we’d be locking these folks away for the rest of their lives.

    Taking this guy’s livelihood away from him, subjecting him to the additional stress of un- or under- employment, would seem to make spousal abuse MORE likely, not less.  

    And let’s face it.  The 18 years without an additional reported incident doesn’t seem like the type of scenario that will end with gunplay in the home.  If there was stalking involved, I would probably agree that this guy was a creep, but in this instance, the incident he was arrested for, he was trying to LEAVE his wife (when SHE grabbed him), not keep her from staying.

    And kestrel has a great point.  He plead to a misdemeanor and paid a $10 fine. If this guy knew that some day he was going to have tacked on the additional punishment of losing his career, most likely he would not have plead guilty.

    We could go with the Dubster’s solution of castrating him as a sex offender.  

    Does his punishment fit his crime?    

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