BUSH PARDON

THE first rule for handling requests for presidential pardons was set down in a report to Congress in 1887, during Grover Cleveland’s first term in office. It said they were to be sent to the attorney general’s “pardon clerk” for “his prompt and appropriate attention.”

Just as important, according to the report, was that the petitioners were to be given a fair shake. They were almost always convicted criminals, but that didn’t mean they were all guilty as charged or deserving of the harsh punishments that had been inflicted on them. And so, the pardon attorney in those days was under instructions to “accord to the convict all that he may be fairly entitled to have said in his favor.” The attorney general, thus provided with “an impartial representation” of the case, was to tell the president what he thought should be done.

Today’s Justice Department seems to have nothing but contempt for those principles. The Bush White House has seemingly never heard of them. Thousands of petitioners for clemency have been waiting for years for a ruling, some since before Bill Clinton left office. Thousands of others have been rejected out of hand, largely because preparing a fair report of what might be said in their favor would take too much time and cost too much money.

As George W. Bush entered the final year of his presidency, it was widely speculated that he would hand out a big bunch of pardons before bowing out — albeit, it was hoped, far more carefully than Mr. Clinton did. But saying no is as much an exercise of the pardon power as saying yes, and it is here that President Bush stands out in comparison with his predecessors. He has already denied more pardon and clemency petitions than any post-World War II president. In his first seven years in office, he rejected 5,966 requests, almost twice as many as Bill Clinton did in eight years, five times more than his father did in four years, and almost five times as many as Ronald Reagan did in eight years.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration’s pardon program is in complete disarray. According to the pardon attorney’s official reports, there is still a huge backlog of clemency petitions in the bureaucratic mill, a total of 2,501 requests “pending” as of Jan. 1.

Just where each one is in the process is never officially disclosed. More than 800 are apparently sitting at the White House waiting a final decision; but the bigger logjam is at the Justice Department, primarily at the Office of the United States Pardon Attorney. Yet nobody there seems to feel much pressure to change things. The five staff lawyers in the office have no deadlines, and in the past they have been allowed to work about half of the time out of their homes. It can take months for a petition to get any attention even thought it’s been logged in as “pending.”

“The wheels are coming off the cart,” one Justice Department official told me the other day. Yet no one up the chain of command seems to be worried. Margaret Colgate Love, who was the pardon attorney from 1991 to 1997 and now represents people seeking pardons, says of her former co-workers, “It’s hard to run an operation when you genuinely feel that what you’re doing doesn’t mean anything to anybody.”

The sorry state of the system became apparent last month with the abrupt resignation of the pardon attorney, Roger Adams, who had succeeded Ms. Love. His departure came on the heels of a seven-month investigation of alleged mismanagement by the Justice Department’s inspector general. While Mr. Adams has disputed the findings, a heavily censored report of the investigation, provided to me on Friday under the Freedom of Information Act, found that he made “highly inappropriate” racial remarks concerning a Nigerian petitioner and threatened retaliation against employees who dared complain about other aspects of his work.