WASHINGTON — In the waning days of his presidency, Bill Clinton promised to use his clemency powers to help low-level drug offenders languishing in prison. When Carlos Vignali walked out of prison on Jan. 20 and returned home to his family in Los Angeles, he appeared to fit the broad outlines of that profile.
But the 30-year-old Vignali, who had served six years of a 15-year sentence for federal narcotics violations, fit another profile entirely. No small-time offender, he was the central player in a cocaine ring that stretched from California to Minnesota. Far from disadvantaged, he owned a $240,000 condominium in Encino and made his way as the son of affluent Los Angeles entrepreneur Horacio Vignali. The doting father became a large-scale political donor in the years after his son's arrest, donating more than $160,000 to state and federal officeholders--including Govs. Pete Wilson and Gray Davis--as he pressed for his son's freedom.
The grateful father called the sudden commutation of his son's sentence by Clinton "a Hail Mary and a miracle."
The improbability that such a criminal would be granted presidential clemency, as well as the younger Vignali's claim that he alone steered a pardon application that caught the president's attention and won his approval, has sparked disbelief and outrage from nearly everyone involved in his case.
"It's not plausible; it makes no sense at all," said Margaret Love, the pardon attorney who oversaw all Justice Department reviews of presidential clemency applications from 1990 to 1997. "Somebody had to help him. There is no way that case could have possibly succeeded in the Department of Justice."
Because it is a hard-edged criminal case, Vignali's commutation adds another dimension to the wave of eleventh-hour Clinton clemencies and raises new questions about the influence of political donors and officials on different stages of the process.
As criminal justice authorities in Minnesota learned of Vignali's sudden freedom, they reacted with the same indignation that has greeted several other beneficiaries of the 140 pardons and 36 commutations Clinton granted in his last hours as president.
The Vignali case also illustrates the secrecy that enshrouds the clemency process.
