It short circuits due process, seems like a vestige of the divine right of kings. I thought the framers wanted to get away from those things.
Anyone versed in the history of why that provision was granted, what say ye?
It’s actually considered a pretty standard power held by the executive. Most governors have the power to pardon people who commit state crimes. And other elected heads of state hold the power to pardon people in their countries.
The framers wanted the powers of all branches of the government to be checked by each other as much as possible. The pardon power acts as a check on both the legislature and judiciary; presidents can use it to void convictions under laws they don’t like, or to reverse the outcome of what they view as unjust judicial process. They can also use it to grant reprieves for convicted offenders whose sentences they view as unduly harsh, or amnesties for whole classes of offenders who they feel should not be punished.
It can be abused (and has been) but that’s true of any government power.
You’re right about that. Many of the ideas about what an executive officer should do were inherited from the constitutional traditions of the British monarchy at the time, such as royal assent of laws, running the military, and pardoning offenders. Those functions of the British monarchy all still exist, though they are now largely carried out upon the advice of Parliament.
Simple answer, because the British (and before him the English) Kings had that power. The answer to many questions why the US Constitution does some things is because the British did it that way and it was followed or (sometimes) done the opposite way.
You might ask why only the House of Representatives can introduce Revenue Bills (the House of Commons won a long and protracted dispute to have that right). Or why its called the “Bill of Rights”. Or Why treason requires two overt acts (English Treason Act 1695)
What an actual Founding Father (and delegate at the Constitutional Convention, though he didn’t really do much heavy lifting there) had to say on the subject (I’m just going to quote pretty much the whole thing, as The Federalist Papers are unquestionably in the public domain).
The Federalist Papers: No. 74, “The Command of the Military and Naval Forces, and the Pardoning Power of the Executive”:
A perfectly proper implementation of law by courts (and an improper implementation even more so) sometimes results in obviously unjust outcomes. There can also be situations where it’s politically convenient and useful (and not necessarily just for people in power. It can serve the general good of the country) to void a sentence. So, it’s useful to have a recourse. It can be done by :
-The jury (jury nullification)
-The court/judge (ruling in equity)
-The legislative body (“ad hoc laws”)
-The executive (power of pardon)
Depending on your country/juridiction, some of these options won’t be available. The power of pardon by the executive is probably the most generally available.
Exactly. In the US there’s a tendency for people to refer to “the justice system”. That’s an abject misnomer. And a very misleading one at that.
We have a legal system, not a justice system. It applies laws according to rules to the facts as they appear to render a decision. If the law is mostly just and the rules are mostly just and the facts are mostly clear and as anticipated in the law, and if the whole process is done non-corruptly *then *justice usually results from the wholly legal process.
To the degree any of those contingencies don’t fully apply to the case at hand, injustice may well result. For which there should be a corrective. First appeal and finally pardon is that corrective.
The power of pardon is in some sense arbitrary and capricious. The cynical among us would say it’s always used in the service of evil, not the service of justice. They’d be flat wrong about the “always” part, but not 100% wrong about the rest.
As said above, there’s no feature of human nature or of human society that’s utterly without drawbacks or misuses.
It just seems antithetical to representative democracy to have that much power vested in one person, instead of some sort of group, even if it’s a small one.
Power vested in a single person is always liable to be used improperly, and this is one power you do not want used improperly.
If people agree that applying the law would be unjust, it wouldn’t be up to one man to stop it.
Many state constitutions now do give the pardon power to a board or commission, but not all, and that’s obviously not how the Framers, drawing upon contemporary English legal practices, decided to do it.
FWIW, pardons have tended to be given much less often since WWII. In the late 19th century, reviewing pardon applications and deciding whether or not to grant them was a major administrative part of the Presidency. Lincoln and Taft for instance, I remember reading, would sometimes set aside whole days to plow through pardon paperwork. Now there is an Office of the Pardon Attorney to handle a lot of that, but the President is not bound by its recommendations.
“It’s better to let 10 guilty men go free than imprison one innocent man.”
The president wasn’t given the right to imprison anyone arbitrarily; only to free them. Even if used more often than not for evil, it pays for itself on the occasions when it frees an innocent, or victim of unjust laws.
Any power invested in one person is liable to abuse. Especially by an unethical power abuser. And much less so by an ethical person.
Every elected official has great discretion over many things. Once elected, the People’s only check on them is political: to ensure they’re not re-elected and to elect somebody who will overturn or reverse insofar as possible the bad acts of the bad actor.
There are far more dangerous powers in the hands of a US President than that of pardon.
At the same time, redesigning the US Presidency to be safe enough to give to the worst imaginable person probably leaves the office neutered into uselessness. IMO that’s not the direction to seek a fix for possible abuse of pardoning power.
Well, you could say that about a lot of the powers vested in the President of the United States.
There’s a degree of historical accident about this. The President was given a suite of powers and functions heavily influenced by the array of powers and functions enjoyed by the British monarch, or by colonial governors representing the monarch, with (in many cases) that the were only to be exercised with some degree of advice or assent from the legislature.
As the UK constitution has evolved, there’s a strong convention that these powers are now only exercisable on the advice of ministers, and ministers both individually and collectively are accountable to Parliament. Specifically the power of pardon is exercised only on the advice of the Home Secretary.
No similar evolution has taken place in the US, where the degree of restraint over the exercise of presidential powers is set pretty much where it was in 1783.
Even less, when it comes to war powers. The President can trigger World War III without Congress having any input at all.
That’s not true!! Congress has a very important input. They get to be part of the fallout. 
Except it’s a benevolent power, not a malicious one. It’s not imprisoning someone who would otherwise be free, its showing leniency to someone who would otherwise be imprisoned. So it’s an act of mercy.
And it’s not the only time one person can can override a group in that matter. If a jury finds someone guilty, the judge can overturn that guilty verdict if he determines that the judgement was unreasonable.
A single judge sitting alone on a bench trial can send someone to jail for lengthy periods of time, so why shouldn’t a single person in the Oval Office have the power to release that person?