Could (and should) a Prez seek to have broad clemency grants reviewed by courts?

The question in the title of this post is prompted in part by a notable opinion from last week authored by US District Judge Gary Brown in US v. Andrews, 20-CR-546 (SDNY Jan. 28, 2025) (available here).  Here is a segment of the interesting opinon:

In less than a month, the federal courts have been inundated by more than 5,500 mass pardons and grants of executive clemency that seemingly bypassed the rigorous vetting processes developed over the last century.  This case is one of them.

This opinion should not be construed as criticism of the reasons underlying the pardons and grants of clemency.  Two presidents of contrasting ideology have issued mass pardons and grants of clemency for very different purposes.  While history may judge the wisdom of these actions, this Court may not.  However, this case, and others like it, spotlight the problems that invariably arise when a president’s unreviewable pardon authority is deployed impetuously, resulting in careless execution of the president’s directives.

In this matter — involving sex trafficking, narcotics distribution and perjury — the grant of executive clemency seems inconsistent with its purported rational.  This Court must abide by this action, while exercising its responsibility regarding the vestige of the sentence imposed, i.e., oversight of the defendant during a four-year period of supervised release.

I recommend the Andrews opinion in full because it provides a good example of a case in which a person who was included within a “mass” (or “blanket” or “class”) clemency may not have been someone the President really would have wanted in the class if all aggravating factors had been given case-specific consideration.  That reality, of course, is the inherent risk with any mass clemency: even if nearly all persons within the class merit clemency, there is almost always going to be one or two or ten cases in which other facts or factors make a particular clemency recipient unworthy.  (The “cash for kids” judge is one example from Prez Biden’s mass commutation of the home confinement cohort; this Andrews case is one example from Prez Biden’s mass commutation of non-violent drug offenders; violent offenders are examples from Prez Trump’s mass pardon of Jan 6 defendants.)

The unavoidable problem of a bad apples in a mass clemency bunch should not, in my view, prevent a President from doing broad and blanket clemency grants.  But I wonder if future presidents might do mass clemency grants that include some authority for courts to review/limit grants based on, say, a defendant having an especially violent criminal history or some other specified  factor.  A half century ago, the Supreme Court wrote in Schick v. Reed, 419 U.S. 256 (1974) that “Presidents throughout our history as a Nation have exercised the power to pardon or commute sentences upon conditions that are not specifically authorized by statute.  Such conditions have generally gone unchallenged and, as in the Wells case, attacks have been firmly rejected by the courts.”  This dicta would seem to support the idea that a President could grant a mass pardon subject to a condition of some kind of court review.

And yet, even if a President could grant mass pardons and/or clemencies conditioned on some kind of court review, would that be a good idea?  Reading this Andrews opinion gives the impression that the court still views its initial sentence as sound and just, and I suspect most sentencing judges are often going to be inclined to see merit in their judgments before any clemency relief.  Might authorizing some court review of some clemency grants lead to undue court rejection of clemency grants?