Pardon

HOUSTON - Gov. George W. Bush announced yesterday that he would pardon a Texas inmate convicted a decade ago of rape, after new DNA evidence convinced even prosecutors and law enforcement officials that the man should be freed. Bush is expected to sign the pardon of Roy Criner today, clearing the way for his release after serving 10 years of a 99-year sentence for the rape of a 16-year-old. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, which rarely approves pardons, voted yesterday 18-0 in favor of pardoning Criner, 35. "I agree with the Board of Pardons and Paroles that credible new evidence raises substantial doubt about the guilt of Roy Criner, and that he should receive a pardon," Bush said in a statement yesterday.

The image from her childhood home on Larkin Street in Annapolis that stuck with Hazel "Missy" Snowden was an old Evening Capital clipping about an anonymous person claiming responsibility for the murder of a pregnant young wife. Next to it, on her father's dresser mirror, was a photograph of John Snowden -- whether from a newspaper or a family photo, she doesn't recall. But what she remembers is that this murder of the white woman was blamed on John Snowden, her father's brother, a black man who was convicted and hanged in 1919, before this other person claimed he did it. Her uncle went to his death proclaiming his innocence.

Former Baltimore City Council President Walter S. Orlinsky has received a presidential pardon for the federal extortion conviction that brought an abrupt end to his quixotic political career nearly two decades ago. President Clinton granted the pardon Tuesday. Orlinsky got the news in a phone call that evening from his son, Eric G. Orlinsky, a Baltimore attorney who helped his father gain official forgiveness for the 1982 crime. "You can't ever quite walk away," Orlinsky, 62, said yesterday.

JOHN SNOWDEN didn't ask for forgiveness. He asked for more than that. An African-American accused of killing a pregnant white woman, he asked people to believe that he didn't do it. He asked the jury that convicted him in a racially charged, controversial trial. And he asked the throng that watched him drop four feet to his death, the last person to die on Anne Arundel County's gallows. Snowden didn't get what he wanted and never will, even in death. His conviction will stand. But his advocates are seeking the next best thing to a proclamation of innocence.

Janet Leigh Dettler -- the Middle River woman serving a life sentence in a Bangkok prison for drug smuggling -- got some hope yesterday when Thailand's ambassador to the United States mentioned the possibility of a pardon during a meeting with her attorney."

The attorney for a man wrongly imprisoned for more than seven years warned yesterday that he will sue the state unless Gov. Parris N. Glendening grants a pardon and the state agrees to pay the man hundreds of thousands of dollars.The warning was issued a day after a House of Delegates committee killed a bill that would have paid Anthony Gray Jr. $7.5 million.The 31-year-old Calvert County man was jailed for 7 1/2 years in the killing of a Chesapeake Beach woman. He had been sentenced to life in prison but was released last month.

WASHINGTON -- As he sat in prison six days before the 1996 presidential election, Webster Hubbell and his lawyers worked frantically to amend old tax returns that had significantly understated his income. This was part of an effort, investigators now suspect, to make him an attractive candidate for a presidential pardon."There is some chance that the day after Election Day, they will make a move that moots everything," Hubbell's lawyer, John Nields, told his client over one of the prison telephones whose calls are routinely recorded by the federal Bureau of Prisons.

Near a fence in Brewer's Hill Cemetery, a cracked and chipped concrete slab streaked with gold-colored fungus marks the grave of John Snowden, the last person to die on the gallows in Anne Arundel County. On Feb. 28, 1919, the black iceman was hanged for the murder of a pregnant white woman, an execution that so riled parts of Annapolis that the National Guard was called out to prevent riots. But questions remain about whether Snowden did kill 20-year-old Lottie May Brandon, questions that disturb several generations of the city's black community who wonder about a belated, anonymously penned confession, questions that disturb a niece who never knew him. Now a renewed request for a pardon is being made by a man who -- though of no relation -- shares the last name of the hanged man and works in a government office built on the spot where John Snowden died proclaiming his innocence.

WASHINGTON - In the first batch of pardons of his final holiday season in the White House, President Clinton pardoned 59 people yesterday, including Dan Rostenkowski, the once-powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, a man whose conviction exemplified the passing of an old-fashioned style of leadership in Congress. Rostenkowski, who was reared by the Chicago Democratic political machine, brought to Congress a mastery of the game of legislation with its premium on brokering, bluffing, and figuring out the compromise that gives the little required but gets a bit more in return.

LONDON -- Three-quarters of a century later, it is the inglorious dead who trouble Britain.Alexander MacKinlay asked the House of Commons yesterday to support a pardon for 307 soldiers executed during World War I for cowardice and desertion, for sleeping at their posts, throwing away their guns or hitting a superior officer."