Grass-roots effort paves path to man's presidential pardon

Bush is among stingiest granters of them in history

NEW YORK - For Leslie O. Collier, the operator of a 600-acre grain farm, it was not so much the felony conviction for killing two bald eagles that stung the most, and that stung plenty. It was the loss of his hunting rifles that went with it.

For his mother, June S. Collier, it was the pain of seeing her son's name sullied in their town of roughly 5,000 people in southeastern Missouri, where her family had lived, farmed, and hunted for four generations.

And for Lanie Black, a former Missouri state representative and a close family friend, it was the perceived injustice of the felony branding that prompted him to help Collier and his mother as they began, roughly a decade ago, to seek the ultimate redemption: a presidential pardon.

The effort proved successful last week, when Collier, 50, became one of 14 people to receive pardons from President Bush, one of the stingiest granters of them in modern history.

The presidential pardon - providing absolution to felons, often in the final days of a presidency - is as American a tradition as Thanksgiving. The framers of the Constitution established presidential pardon power to help a president spread goodwill, particularly at crucial moments after insurrection or rebellion.

Public attention has usually focused on the more celebrated or disputed cases, like George Washington's pardons for the participants of the armed Whiskey Rebellion against high liquor taxes in 1795; Gerald Ford's preemptive pardon of Richard M. Nixon in 1974; Bill Clinton's pardon in 2001 of the fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose former wife was a major contributor to his presidential library.

Public speculation on the expected next round of pardons from Bush has mostly focused on Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., and other administration officials involved in disputed policies like the domestic wiretapping program, or the Republican members of Congress convicted of fraud in his second term, like Rep. Randy Cunningham of California.

But, in recent history, the list of those who have received pardons has been dominated less by convicts with connections to the upper echelons of American power than by people of modest means in the heartland - an odometer cheat from Mississippi; a bootlegger from Tennessee; and Collier - all of whose relatively minor crimes ultimately led them to be labeled felons.

For most of them, it is a leap of faith to file an application with the pardon attorney's office at the Department of Justice, which culls through thousands of requests before making recommendations to the president that he is under no obligation to follow.

Collier's crime was unlikely and, he said in an interview, unintended.

Hunting on the farmland he rents, he began noticing the reappearance of wild turkeys, decades after they were believed to have died away. But he feared that a pack of coyotes in the area would not give them a chance to breed. So he laid a trap of ground beef laced with the pesticide Furadan, which, under federal law, may not be used as animal poison.

Seven coyotes died after eating the beef. But several other animals fed on their carcasses and died, including the bald eagles.

The dead eagles were found by a passerby who alerted the federal authorities who, in turn, identified the poison that killed them and tracked its purchase to Collier.

He pleaded guilty to two counts of violating the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, and to the misdemeanor charge of illegal use of a pesticide.

With no prior criminal history, he was sentenced to two years of probation and was ordered to pay a $10,000 fine.

As a convicted felon, Collier would have to give up his collection of hunting guns, a blow to his lifestyle.

A local Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms official told him that only a presidential pardon would get him his guns back, Collier said.

"He said, 'Good luck with that' - like, 'Fat chance,' " he said.

Of the nearly 8,000 pardon petitions Bush has received during his presidency, he has granted 171. He has separately commuted eight prison sentences. At the end of his term, Clinton had granted 396 pardons and commuted 61 sentences.