Terrific article on the pardon power
Margaret Colgate Love, who served seven years as US Pardon Attorney under the first President Bush and President Clinton, has a fantastic article concerning the history and present state of the pardon power in the most recent issue of the ABA’s Litigation magazine. The article, entitled “Reviving the Benign Prerogative of Pardoning” and available for download below, is an absolute must read for anyone interested in pardon law and policy. Here is a snippet:
Surely pardoning should rank among the happiest of sovereign duties — though it can also be among the most difficult when a life is at stake or public opinion is inflamed. And there is a compelling present need for pardon because the criminal justice system has never been more harsh and unforgiving. Aggressive prosecution strategies and mandatory sentencing have filled our prisons to the bursting point and tagged more than 13 million of our fellow citizens with lingering collateral disabilities and the stigma of a criminal record. Evidently Justice Anthony Kennedy thought so when he called on the American Bar Association in August of 2003 to “consider a recommendation to reinvigorate the pardon process at the state and federal levels” — and evidently so did the ABA House of Delegates when it urged states and the federal government the following year to “expand the use of executive clemency.”
If pardoning is so gratifying to the giver and so necessary to the system, why is there so little of it going on? Why do governors and presidents act as if they no longer have the same freedom to pardon that their predecessors had? How can we make them understand that, if pardoning was unacceptably dangerous a few years ago, it is now safe to go back in the water? To get the answers, we need to look at the history and practice of pardoning in the United States.
Download litigation_winter2006_revivingthebenign.pdf
Related recent posts on pardons and clemency: