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Comment by ssully | Hacker News Reader

I am confident he will have a few tweets about this before tomorrow morning.

Does anyone know if President Elect Trump has the authority to overturn this sentence commuting?

Not arbitrarily. If it's a conditional commutation, then there would need to be hearings to document and assert the violations of those conditions first.

Subsequent presidents can "un-pardon" people pardoned by previous presidents, so I have a hard time imagining that a commutation is somehow immune to that kind of thing.

EDIT: See follow-ups. I may be mistaken here, and need to run to a meeting, so I can't dig any more now.

EDIT 2: http://swampland.time.com/2008/12/25/more-on-pardons/

Relevant quote, "Ulysses S. Grant’s first clemency decision, on his third day in office, was to revoke two pardons granted by Andrew Johnson. Both men challenged Grant’s power to do so, and lost their case in federal court."

EDIT 3: Here's the link to the blog post linked from the Time article, in edit 2, from the Wayback Machine, for sake of completeness.

http://web.archive.org/web/20090212091707/http://pardonpower...

> Subsequent presidents can "un-pardon" people pardoned by previous presidents

I've never heard that, never heard of it happening, and don't believe it's true. However, I've never researched it. Can you cite an example or a source?

I remember reading something some time ago about Grant having reversed some of Johnson's pardons, but I'm not finding a reference to specifics, so I may be mistaken.

EDIT: Found it. See my post up-thread for a link.

IN RE DE PUY, the court found that a prisoner pardoned by the previous administration could have his pardon revoked by the following administration so long as the pardon had not yet been delivered and accepted by the prisoner.

How can they unpardon them? The conviction has been undone, and we don't permit double jeopardy (constitutionally prohibited) so a second charge for the same crime can't be filed.

From my brief google searches, it seems that it cannot be undone, by the Congress, by the Courts, nor by the President.

It can and has been undone before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Toussie

This is not the same and relies on the pardon/commutation not being fully executed.

The President doesn't have the power to unilaterally reimpose criminal consequences, which is what an unpardon would amount to. Instead, subsequent Presidents would have to argue the person was never really pardoned in the first place. George W. Bush did this with Isaac Toussie.

To be clear, Bush both pardoned and 'unpardoned' Toussie. He wasn't undoing a prior President's action.

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