Does it work exactly how it is shown in TV/Movies? I mean other then plot twists in 24 and Prison Break why would the founding fathers want to include it?
Mostly, it’s an echo of the concept of High Justice in the hand of the King.
It was always the case that the monarch could pardon someone. Since we had no monarch, we wanted someone to wield that power, and it made the President much more regal.
Tris
It’s the final check on a runaway court system and legislature, giving the executive a chance to keep them from going nuts. They have similiar legal controls on what the executive (and each other) can do.
So the president cannot pardon himself correct? When Nixon was pardoned was their a big uproar
Nixon did not pardon himself.
If a president pardoned himself, it would be legal, unless the Supreme Court chose to declare venue, and even then there would be a very difficult argument, since there is no proscription against such a thing in the Constitution.
Tris
I’ve also heard that it was intended to prevent blackmail.
President is considering signing an unpopular bill. Laura and Jenna are arrested and sentenced to life for MIP while the overzealous prosecutor notes on no uncertain terms that he would rather like the bill to not become law.
The POTUS can only pardon for federal crimes. If Laura and Jenna were arrested and tried under state law Bush couldn’t (legally) do a thing.
Maybe not:
“However, it is clear from the above-quoted passage that if the Court had determined that the state was attempting to punish or penalize the offender for the pardoned offense, the state’s action would have been a violation of the Constitution. At least one federal court of appeals has expressly adopted this position. In Bjerkan, the Seventh Circuit, relying on the Court’s dicta in Carlesi, held that “a presidential pardon restores state as well as federal civil rights.” 529 F.2d at 129. The court stated that once a federal offense has been pardoned, any “attempted punishment [by a state] would constitute a restriction on the legitimate, constitutional power of the President to pardon an offense against the United States and would be void as circumscribing and nullifying that power.” Id. at 128.”
There have been instances in history where a person has been proven innocent by DNA evidence after conviction, and the courts and/or District Attorney are either slow or obstinate because they don’t want to admit they’re wrong.
In such cases, I think a pardon is reasonable.
Maybe it’s reasonable, but as stated above, the President has no authority to issue pardons for state convictions. That’s something the governor would do if he/she was so inclined.
For example, former New York governor George Pataki issued 32 pardons while in office. Twenty-eight were for people convicted under the Rockefeller-era drug laws. One of the other four was for comedian Lenny Bruce, forty years after his obscenity conviction and thirty-seven year after his death.
Here’s what Alexander Hamilton had to say about it it Federalist Number 74
Also remember that what’s granted is not always a full pardon. Quite often a Governor will commute a long sentence to time already served, so that the fully reformed guy 23 years into a 40 year sentence is released on a commutation to time already served. A full pardon removes all post-release liabilities, too, and sometimes a former convict who’s fully “paid his debt to society” will request a pardon so that, e.g., he can take a job from which felons are barred, get back his vote in those states where convicted felons lose the franchise permanently, etc.
Finally, the point that the Chief Executive of the sovereignty having custody is the only person who can commute or pardon needs to be emphasized. During FDR’s time as President, a Virginia jury convicted a black man of killing the white man who was in the process of beating him to death, and imposed the death penalty. FDR put as much pressure as possible on Virginia’s governor to commute the sentence, but to no avail, and the black man was executed. FDR himself, though President, was powerless to act; it was a state crime and conviction.
I’m not sure what you mean by the Supreme Court choosing to “declare venue.” If “declare venue” implies some kind of spontaneous and unsolicited judicial intervention, then there is no such process in the American legal system. But I assume that you mean the Court granting a writ of certiorari and reviewing a decision by a lower federal court, which is the only way that this particular issue would come before the High Court, since it doesn’t fall within the Court’s original jurisdiction.
But even that approach is highly problematic, since there may not be a justiciable “case or controversy” that a federal court can decide. First, who would have standing to challenge a President pardoning himself? More to the point, a pardon is the classic “political question” – a constitutional issue that is textually committed to a coordinate branch – in which the courts will not interfere. The Constitution explicitly commits the pardoning power to the President, so the exercise of that power probably isn’t subject to judicial review.
You bet there was. But the uproar wasn’t over the right of Gerald Ford to pardon Nixon, it was whether Ford and Nixon had made a deal, and generally whether Ford should have pardoned Nixon.
Except that accepting a pardon is an admission of guilt (Burdick v. United States):
If they are in fact, innocent, that might be problematic.
A president cannot grant a pardon in cases of impeachment (which is part of why Nixon resigned before he could be impeached), and, for practical reasons, no one brings charges against a sitting President without impeaching first. And after the trial, if he remains in office, there’s nothing to pardon, and if he doesn’t, he no longer has the power to pardon.
A president cannot stop Congress from impeaching him, but there’s no reason why he couldn’t pardon himself to preclude the possibility of going to prison.