According to the Constitution, the president has the power to issue pardons or commute the prison sentences on any criminal conviction. This pardon, regardless of justification, cannot be overruled. Every pardon should either right a judicial wrong or show mercy where mercy is due. However, history clearly shows that those requisites do not always dictate who receives forgiveness. Self-serving or relatively inconsequential pardons are often the norm.

One would think that, having committed the crimes, felons ought to bear the ramifications of their actions. However, President Bush's pardons include a multitude of drug users, embezzlers, thieves of government property, and a moonshiner. He has also pardoned criminals involved in bank fraud, stolen explosives, and drug importation and distribution.

On the other hand, Bush has issued less than half the number of pardons presidents Clinton and Reagan did during their two terms and, while he did commute Scooter Libby's sentence, he has not pardoned any famously slimy criminals (think Hearst, Hoffa, Felt and Weinberger).

Given the awesome power of the pardon, Bush has an opportunity to re-evaluate cases where the law has not been merciful - given unusual circumstances. Yet while he is comfortable pardoning thieves and drug dealers, he has not pardoned two Border Patrol agents who shot a fleeing drug smuggler in the rump.

In 2005, the two agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, shot a drug smuggler as he fled back into Mexico. The agents ordered the smuggler to stop. He chose to run for it instead and left behind a van containing almost 800 pounds of marijuana destined for the streets of America. The two agents offered conflicting testimony and concealed evidence out of their fear of "getting in trouble," and there is controversy over whether they actually believed the drug dealer was armed. Clearly, the agents made mistakes.

One undisputed fact is that the agents were simply trying to do their job, a complicated job that by its nature creates a highly charged atmosphere fraught with danger and an instinctive sense of self-preservation. Another fact is that the man they shot had criminal intentions. If the agents had wanted to kill him, out of malice, racism or for sport, the buttocks would not have been their primary target.

The drug smuggler, an illegal alien named Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, escaped. Later he was granted immunity so that he could testify against the agents. The agents were sentenced to 11- and 12-year prison terms on charges of causing serious bodily injury, assault with a deadly weapon, discharge of a firearm, and violating the drug smuggler's civil rights.

Ironically, earlier this year Aldrete-Davila pleaded guilty to smuggling more drugs into the U.S. just months after testifying against the agents. Clearly, the shot to the rump and his subsequent elevation from criminal to victim of civil rights abuse did nothing to reform his criminal mentality.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, generally a staunch supporter of the liberal view (which in this case has promoted the rights of this drug smuggler and condemned the agents), asked a witness at a hearing the following question: "Any drug dealer on the border who doesn't obey a command and runs cannot be shot?" She then remarked, "No wonder so much [sic] drugs are coming across the border. That's amazing to me."

Margaret Colgate Love, the U.S. pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997, recently suggested that pardons have not been used enough and that "punishments have become too harsh and the stigma of conviction too permanent." Her position enables moral and cultural decline and empowers criminals who, with a smug confidence, can play the system until they can, literally, get away with murder. What Love fails to understand is that it is not the quantity of pardons but the quality of pardons that brings mercy and justice.

The motivation for pardons ought to be altruistic. This was not the case in President Clinton's pardon-palooza, where pardons were issued to protect his backside. Clinton's last-day pardon of fugitive Marc Rich, a man who evaded more than $48 million in taxes and ran illegal oil deals with Iran during the hostage crisis, was widely disparaged, especially in light of the large donations Rich's ex-wife gave to the Clintons. At the time, then Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder was heavily involved in facilitating that pardon. Holder is now President-elect Barack Obama's nominee to run the Justice Department.

Bush has issued one mercy pardon, to farmer Leslie O. Collier, who accidentally killed two bald eagles when he poisoned some coyotes and the eagles subsequently ate the meat and died. Unfortunately, he has yet to define the sentencing of these two Border Patrol agents as overly harsh. He would do well to pardon them and put them back to work where they belong, patrolling our nation's border.