The recent rejection by a federal judge of Jonathan Pollard’s request for a change in his onerous parole conditions – he cannot travel to Israel and he must wear an electronic monitor, limiting the jobs he can be hired for – is but the latest in a series of injustices visited upon an American citizen who has more than paid his debt to society for crimes he committed nearly 35 years ago.
It is an oft-told story that the U.S. government reneged on a plea bargain that Mr. Pollard struck in which he was not to receive a life sentence and that, despite several attempts to do so, was never permitted to withdraw. And now after serving his full statutorily defined “life sentence,” he is not being permitted to get on with his life.
No other person convicted of similar crimes has ever been treated by our criminal justice system the way he has. We have no doubt that Israel was the beneficiary of his crime still rankles the intelligence community and others and has been a factor in his unique treatment. And perhaps this reality has driven the support Mr. Pollard has drawn from the Jewish community.
In any event, Mr. Pollard seems unable to persuade federal judges to override the dictates of our prosecutorial bureaucracy and cut him some slack.
There is one particularly perplexing element in the mix that has never been addressed. The federal prosecutors who charged Mr. Pollard and subsequently entered into the plea agreement with him necessarily did so on behalf of their client, the United States government. So the agreement had to have had the approval of officials who made an assessment of the nature and seriousness of the crimes. Yet all that seems to have gone by the boards and the continuous torment directed his way seems to have assumed a life of its own.
It is time for this unseemly persecution to end so that Mr. Pollard can at least attempt to resume a normal life.