Finally, there’s
President Obama’s commutation of the sentence of Oscar Lopez Rivera last week.
Rivera was the leader of the FALN, a Puerto Rican independence group. From 1974
to 1983, the group claimed responsibility for more than 100 bombings across the
country. Its deadliest attack occurred at lunchtime at NYC’s historic Fraunces
Tavern, headquarters for George Washington during the Revolutionary War. The
attack killed four people and injured more than 60.
The FBI arrested Lopez Rivera in 1981. At his trial in 1983, Judge
Thomas McMillen called him an un-rehabilitated revolutionary” and sentenced him
to 55 years in prison. Another 15 years were added after he planned two escapes
from Leavenworth prison.
In 1999, he declined an offer of clemency from President Bill
Clinton, refusing to renounce violence. Joe Connor, whose father was killed in
the Fraunces Tavern bombing, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that, at Lopez
Rivera’s parole hearing in 2011, he offered “not a shred of remorse or
contrition.”
City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said last week she
“cried with joy” upon hearing of the commutation. Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator
of the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” said he was “sobbing with gratitude.”
And the city’s Panderer-in Chief, Mayor de Blasio, tweeted: “Thank
you, POTUS for freeing Oscar Lopez Rivera. Congratulations for all who fought
for this day.”
Call me ignorant, but I don’t get it.
