The Amnesty Failure

Amnesty, once among the most volatile of national issues, has quietly fizzled. This week the 18-member presidential clemency board will close shop after a year in operation, and its success has been slight. Only 21,000 of the nation's 108,000 convicted Viet Nam-era draft evaders and deserters have applied to the panel. It approved 16,500 of the applications and passed them on to the White House, where the young men were to be granted either full amnesty or conditional amnesty based upon their performance in a year in an alternate-service job such as hospital orderly or park attendant. Just about everybody, however, has skipped out on the jobs. Only 264 of the first 1,000 men assigned to such work have enrolled in the job programs, and officials see no reason to expect the remaining men to be any more enthusiastic about the arrangement.

The Pentagon and the Justice Department administer separate amnesty programs, and their luck has been no better. Of the 10,000 military deserters the Pentagon is aware of, 84 have completed the alternate-service work. The Justice Department deals with the radicals who evaded the draft and went to Canada, Sweden and Third World countries. Of 4,400 men in this category, only 722 have agreed to alternative service in exchange for the dropping of charges of violating the Selective Service laws. There are many egregious offenders who will not be permitted to come back without serving prison sentences. Others will simply come home, hire lawyers and fight their cases in court, where sentences are generally light or suspended. In many cases, deserters and draft evaders have returned to the fold in their own good time--and on their own terms.

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