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Comment by wewewedxfgdf | Hacker News Reader

I can't see any way in which a "Pardon Power" can ever result in anything except miscarriage of justice.

If you think there needs to be an escape hatch to fix injustices then you have a bigger problem.

I can. Let’s say for example that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was used to prosecute you for downloading JSTOR documents which you had already access to. And you are facing the cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, personal asset forfeiture. Now, would a pardon from the highest executive office be a miscarriage when the prosecution should never have happened in the first place? I don’t think so, I don’t think all laws are neutral (eg Patriot Act) or all prosecutions are equally valid, therefore a pardon may indeed be a way to tipping the scales to a more fair society.

That said, I have never seen the current administration do that.

But isn’t that what the parent says? Fix the underlying laws instead of relying on a single person to randomly overrule the law

I don’t think parent commenter says so, he only claims one thing for himself, that pardon power is always a miscarriage of justice. Then he asks another thing of us, which is explicitly excluding himself, indicating that he thinks all laws and all applications of law and justice is fair.

Fixing the laws takes time.

We will always find ourselves in situations in which our existing laws allow for people to fall through cracks. I can see pardoning as a way to address that partially, yet it doesn’t explain what an adequate judgment would be instead. It’s simultaneously important in niche situations and yet too coarse of a solution.

You can as easily use pardons to tip the scales to a more corrupt society.

If you assume, hypothetically, that the justice system is operating as it should, a pardon means giving one person the right to ignore the laws of the country for a select few acquaintances.

If one has to tolerate this blatant avenue for favoritism, I’d rather see the Supreme Court or judges themselves invested with this power, rather than the president.

I guess I am biased by believing in the separation of the executive and judiciary powers.

An argument against vesting pardons to the SC is that they are supposed to simply apply the law, not make quick corrections based on value judgments. If separation of powers is a concern, remember that checks and balances also exist.

If I may suggest anything, perhaps replacing the president should be made easier, either by making the people be able to recall the president, or by recalling the congressmen, and the congressmen then follow through with impeachment. Or both.

> If I may suggest anything, perhaps replacing the president should be made easier, either by making the people be able to recall the president, or by recalling the congressmen, and the congressmen then follow through with impeachment. Or both.

You may indeed suggest it. Now, how do we make it reality so that "We The People" can get some of our power back in this supposedly "Free" nation?

I don't have the way to fix the situation, for I am no seer, but I can suggest the classical solutions:

- Contact your representatives;

- Seek better representation;

- Participate in/organize local political movements;

- Become less reliant on the government and its private cronies.

> - Become less reliant on the government and its private cronies.

All great suggestions, but this last one is maybe the best one overall. ;)

I think they're more talking about systemic effects resulting from such a concept. When you have unchecked power concentrated at a single position, that position will inevitably use that power for their own personal gain, which in the case of pardons happens by enabling crime.

In your opinion, which administration have you known to have issued a pardon that was equally justifiable in the eyes of members of political parties from both sides of the isle?

NitPick: "aisle" ... and it doesn't need to be "justifiable in the eyes of members of [any] political parties" in orderto be Justice when a wrong has been commited by the "justice system".

Any time a President can use their pardon power to free any actually innocent person from a genuinely unjust act, they should do so.

Problem is, we've got Presidents who'd rather abuse it arbitrarily in unjust and fraudulent ways. Thus, "pardon power" probably just shouldn't exist at all I suppose, or at the very least it should have some sort of "guardrails" / oversight attached somehow...

This is not going to win me any new fans but first problem I see is who can truly prove "actual innocence?" Only way to do that is to use "Sodium thiopental". Last time I checked that is not allowed in the American Justice System, e.g., SCOTUS Townsend v. Sain (1963). Also, given that humans are emotional beings, I don't see a way for judges, politicians, jurors to be held accountable or subject to any "guardrails/oversight." Only way to do that is to devoid them of emotions e.g., temporary chemical emotion wipe, or replace them with cyber judges e.g., GORT from The Day the Earth Stood Still. Since that is unlikely to happen, in the short term anyway, things will not change. I suppose if communism becomes the new norm, then judges will be less impartial, as history has shown. But this leads us back to the same problem, doesn't it.

Chelsea Manning had her sentence commuted.

I think the fact that you use a very high profile and beloved person as your example is in fact why giving pardoning power to the executive branch is bad — the pardon goes to whoever is able to draw the attention and appear the most likeable to the person with the pardoning power.

If you think a law is bad, repeal it. Go through the same legislative process that made it happen in the first place. Trying to fix systematic issues with one off bandaids heavily impacted by personal judgement of whoever happens to be in power is just asking for corruption.

The problem isn’t always the law, sometimes it is the implementation. Pardoning someone who was later found to be convicted through a travesty of justice (corrupt prosecutor and/or judge) does not mean that the law is bad, only that the system is made up of fallible people.

If pardons need to happen with frequency to correct those errors, then the system is in serious trouble. Perhaps all pardons should trigger a Congressional review process to work on improving the system as a whole. (Not that Congress does anything good, these days.)

I agree with the example given in the sibling comment, and this is why the framers believed there needed to be a final “safety valve” outside the courts. Legal systems are imperfect, and sometimes a pardon is the only practical way to remedy an egregious error.

Another example where pardons might be useful is when laws are changed after sentencing. If the new law does not provide for retroactive adjustments, a president or governor can grant clemency in order to correct disparities in sentencing outcomes.

Too bad the safety valve is corrupt and dishonest.

So is the judiciary at times

The judicial branch has a set of laws, a system of appeals, etc. Perfect? No.

But decidedly better than an incurious buffoon arbitrarily handing out get of jail cards in exchange for political gain and/or self-enrichment.

Given who's sitting at the top of the judiciary right now, the main difference is that there are a slightly larger but still single digit number of buffoons who handed the buffoon you're talking about his get out of jail card for their politican gain and self-enrichment.

A finite set of symbols (laws) can never express everything a reasonable person would want to be allowed to happen in the world.

There are hundreds of years of examples of it being used. How closely did you actually go through them before deciding that it's literally impossible for it to ever result in a just outcome?

Pardons are useful in a single specific way. As the laws cannot be changed retroactively (this would be against the principles of democracy), you need something to handle the case where a law was too strict or too dumb and is rescinded. In my country, pardons are mostly issued by judges, and presidential pardons are also reviewed by judges (and always transformed into 'commutation of sentence' instead of full pardon, so that the person is still guilty)

There's always going to be miscarriages of justice and laws which are morally wrong.

e.g. Alan Turing being prosecuted for homosexuality.

Take a look at the list of people pardoned by any president except the current one. Most (but not all) of the pardons are to correct clear miscarriages of justice.

Local cops/AG persecuting groups they don’t like

It’s your politicians who are crooked beyond belief, and have been for a long time.

In the early 90s, Jean Chrétien was caught on a hot mike incident decrying that American politicians make sure that every vote they give has a local benefit for them. He was right to be incredulous that there is no party line in American politics; the only safety against pure cronyism is morals.

US politicians were appalled and reportedly threatened Chrétien with supporting the Québec separatists. He was never caught complaining again.

All that to say that Trump is the end result of the long tumble of US politics. Unless you rewrite your constitution I consider you guys toast. You’ll lose democracy in my lifetime.

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