Honestly, this should be the general year-long policy.
You still have a moral claim that you are factually innocent, which is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it - that is, nothing. You don’t have a legal claim to factual innocence, which is what Arpaio wanted. If you don’t want to be a convict, reject the pardon and let justice take her majestic course.
That’s a good question, and one that suggests blanket pardons are not within the presidential gift. Nixon didn’t confess to anything because he hadn’t been charged with anything yet.
Does accepting a pardon mean confessing guilt? WaPo says it’s complicated.
Well, on one hand we have the Supreme Court and various other courts.
On the other, we have a guy writing his opinion.
Tough call.
The “guy” is Eugene Volokh, one of the best-known law professors and constitutional lawyers in the country.
But he doesn’t have the power to undo existing judicial decisions with his resume. He can opine, but that’s all it is.
Yep, sure is.
Well, if you go back to what I posted above, it is generally believed that this is the case, but it hasn’t been definitively ruled on at any point since.
Someone would have to challenge that assumption in court and have the standing to do so, and I just don’t see that happening. Although if Pence were to pardon Trump, he started suing people for calling him Guilty and it went to the courts, I could see him riding it all the way up.
It’s not even clear to me what “accepting a pardon means confessing guilt” actually even means. Certainly, there is a difference between a legal definition of that, if any, and a common usage definition.
If I say “Bob is a confessed child rapist”, I mean, Bob himself has said that he raped children, which (barring coerced confessions) makes it pretty much certain that Bob raped children, and makes Bob worse than an accused child rapist, and even worse than a convicted child rapist.
On the other hand, if Bob was accused of child rape, and then convicted of child rape, but professed his innocence all along, and then was pardoned, and the reason given for the pardon was that the president/governor believed that the whole trial was a fiasco, and Bob accepted the pardon because he didn’t want to spend his life in prison… well, I certainly wouldn’t put Bob into the same category as a “confessed child rapist”. And there’s no way any supreme court decision is even relevant to how I would feel about Bob in that situation.
On the other hand, I can imagine that there are subtle legal difference between “confessed” and “convicted” and “accused”, and maybe for some of those, “convicted-and-then-was-pardoned-and-accepted-the-pardon” has a legal status that is most similar to “confessed”… for instance, giving up 5th amendment protection.
But I think in common usage, people hearing “accepting a pardon means confessing your guilt” would not be thinking about legal status, but about moral/ethical everyday “guilt”.
Except, the Shitgibbon does not sue people in order to win outright, he just drags them through the courts until they are exhausted and destitute.
New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez wants to make police officers immune from prosecution for their actions on the job.
Holy fucking crap is that a horrible idea.
Yeah, there’s the caveat ‘as long as they’re complying with their training’, but that’s a huge can of worms right there, especially if someone cites their “Bulletproof Warrior” training, which strongly promotes the idea of shooting at the slightest hint of trouble.
“It says right here in the training manual - “If the suspect even has a DRAWING of a gun, shoot him with every bullet you have””
So, sorry, I’m immune!
No fascist state can prosper when police are held accountable for their actions. So if we want to continue to work toward becoming a solidly-fascist nation, of course we have to free police from all such accountability.
Duh!
It would be no different than if the didn’t get a pardon, and they were in prison or otherwise serving their sentence. If Bob professes his innocence, but is convicted by a court of law, what catagory would you put him in? Do you categorize people that are convicted of a crime differently if they profess their innocence? How does that catagory change because of a pardon?
Just because one person has exercised their judgement to overrule the sentence that the court has deemed appropriate doesn’t mean that that one person in their unilateral judgement can simply declare them innocent.
Call him a “pardoned child rapist” if it makes you feel better.
Senator Tom Cotton is issuing cease and desist letters ordering his constituents to quit contacting his office.
Individual constituents, individually. I don’t think those letters have any legal force, either.
His opponents, come election time, need to give that fact some air time.
“He’s elected to represent all of the people of his district, yet he’s filing cease and desist letters against his own constituents because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. Is this the kind of Congressman you want to represent you?”
In the Illinois gubernatorial race, one of the Republican candidates offers a particularly unfortunate talking point: