I suspect that the idea originally was to give some safety valve but if it is used more than a few times by a President, it makes a mockery of it and it should be removed as a power. How can a President ever decide that the entire legal process is flawed and their opinion is right? If the sentence was too long then change the sentencing guidelines.
On its own it is not that bad an idea for someone who carries a mandate of the majority of the population to be able to grant pardons.
Taken to the extreme, we could have an impartial legal system putting in prison criminals from an even mix of society, and then the president pardoning everyone from the majority group, leaving in prison only the minorities.
And how would you call a justice system, so complicated and convulted and therefore expensive that poor people (from minorities) don't really stand a chance to get their justice there?
Obviously Ross was not in that group, but I see presidential pardon as a potential tool to counter the flaws of the justice system.
That reminds me of the early 2000s, where there were a lot of US debates around around terrorism and "harsh interrogations" i.e. torture.
A certain bloc of politicians and commentators kept bringing up a hypothetical scenario where there was a nuclear bomb counting down, and some guy wouldn't admit where it was hidden in a major city. My favorite response to that involved presidential pardons, something along the lines of:
1. "So what? If everything you say is true, then the authorities would simply torture the guy and seek a pardon afterwards. We already have an exceptional mechanism for those exceptional situations, meaning that's not a reason to change it."
2. "Conversely, any interrogator who isn't confident of a pardon is on who does not believe it's at ticking-bomb situation, meaning they cannot justify torturing someone anyway, they just want to do it to make their job marginally easier. That's bad, so it should stay illegal."
If we assume that both you and MLK were right, but that different policies better suit different conditions, then your proposal could maximize meritocratic effectiveness in an already-very-fair society, whereas MLK's way (the Voting Rights Act) provides a better minimum standard of human rights (similar to 1st and 2nd Amendment protections for people).
Would it be a better system if the not-allowed group is totally dependent on the people that are allowed to vote?
The idea has been around for a bit and I call it interesting, but also with huge potential of misuse.
Change the test slightly, so your target audience will yield better results, giving you a better result.
Either way, as long as climate change and darwinism are controversial topics, I see it hard to implement in a meaningful way.
1500 in jail for protesting in DC? Really, less than that in jail after months BLM riots afaik. Sure, jail a few bad boys, but 1500? No way.
Throw a rock at people in power and go jail. Rape and murder is fine, no threat to DC.
Congress makes laws and impeaches presidents, courts judge constitutionality of laws and try cases of treason and presidents appoint judges and grant pardons.
You can't have impeachment without pardon, otherwise, there wouldn't be a check against judicial tyranny.
I've had this thought before and my tentative conclusion is "no". It boils down to the purpose of democracy which is NOT to produce the best government but to make people feel ok about having a government at all.
https://www.crmvet.org/info/lithome.htm#litbkgnd
Sorry for the snark, it's just a very hard problem because we'd end up in a situation where the voters would decide who is part of their club.
Don’t dress up your stance in fancy garb when it comes down to something baser.
It's not one that should be needed or acceptable, and had his successor been someone who seemed to respect law and order I'd have agreed with you, but in the present circumstances it'd seem crazy not to.
The laws should represent, what the people want. Not a small caste of lawyers and lobbyist what it often rather seems to be.
Presidential power is a direct way to represent peoples wishes. Or well, could be, if the voting system wouldn't be flawed as well ..
I guess my argument boils down to: We already discriminate. My thoughts are that the way we do it is not optimal.
Yes, every president has pardons that are arguable (Biden pardoning his son, for example). And anyone pardoned has been found guilty of a crime, by definition. But not all crimes are equal.
Pardoning 1500 people that participated in a (luckily failed) insurrection that caused 5 deaths and 100+ injured, is an extremely bad precedent, and sends a very bad signal.
Pardoning people convicted of marijuana possession (like Biden did) is not the same thing as pardoning the head of the worlds biggest guns and drugs marketplace. Even if he did not kill anyone himself (it was proven, just to a lesser extent, but fine). Those drugs and guns most definitely did kill people.
You want a majority to be able to decide who gets punished and who goes free, and even the best designed laws will have unforseen consequences. If the majority is 'evil', well there's just not all that much that can be done in a democracy. Yes it would be better to live in a dictatorship of the most virtuous person in existence, but if you ever figure out how to do that please let me know.
And till those steps are implemented, don't you think you would enjoy it, if the next president would pardon Snowden, or your personal favorite case of unjustice?
What you are doing here is a distraction from the topic - whataboutism.
Trump and his minons tried to undo the results of an election. An election he lost. Lost even while abusing his power as president (see his calls in Ukraine and Georgia as evidence).
Nobody on the left supports looters or rapists. If there is evidence someone committed a crime, prosecute them. Trump is the only person I know that supports rapists (see Epstien and Gaetz). He says if you are loyal to him, you don't have to face the consequences of your actions. That to me is what is most scary.
I think Bidens family pardons are problematic as well. I can understand why he did it.
I dont understand the argument for pardoning Ross.
This is like crying about whataboutism when a judge cites judicial precedent to justify a sentence. Good luck with that, it might work as a "nuh-uh" in online discussions but in real life, precedent does actually matter.
I think life with no parole was far to harsh.
Trump was also the target of "politically motivated judicial scrutiny" (and rightfully so!) So I guess he would be justified in pardoning himself and his entire family, right?
Trump was president and commited a ton of crimes while being one, and a ton of others before and after. He was rightfully prosecuted, but unfortunately escaped any real consequences. His trials were mediatised and saw big attention form politicians because he was a former president, who was impeached being sued for a ton of different criminal activities, including multiple directly related to his job (the top job in the US). His trials were directly relevant to the wider public and political establishment, and should have prevented him from ever running again for even a school board.
Biden's son is a nobody. No high positions in government, no power, no shady deals getting billions from Saudis or whatever. Run of the mill small time criminal who got paraded through Congress simply because his father was president.
It's really absurd to try to compare the two, or claim that the myriad of trials against Trump were "politically motivated". The man is a fucking convicted criminal, rapist, absurd creep, tax cheat, stole from a children's cancer charity, plan and simple and obvious for anyone. And uet he's back at the top job, publicly promising vengeance to all those who wronged him. He directly and publicly threatened Zuckerberg and others.
It's really absurd trying to compare the two, and I refuse to believe this can be done in good faith.
Biden did bad pardons, now Trump has no other course (eg fix the system), but to do bad pardons as well? Except when Trump does it it is not bad because Biden did it first?
This might be a good first step, too. Read more books from a time when people were struggling with arbitrary justice.
Personally, I blame lawyers and prosecutors. A law should be simple, easy to evaluate if it was broken, and always prosecuted. And when it comes to punishments, they should be explicit and without the possibility of being altered.
We've gotten too complacent with making all these arbitrary rules, then fiddling with their non-enforcement and severity by virtue of reduced sentences.
[0] A big if, I know…
Regimes have toppled in response to popular uprising against imprisonments perceived as unjust. Having a system of governance without a way to rectify that seems unwise to me.
The check on Presidential authority, in turn, is impeachment. It's not a perfect system by any means, but in my estimation it's a good one.
Because you’re political view of it is indeed that they were having an insurrection. To the right they were just having a protest that got violent but not anymore violent than any of the others throughout the country that year.
> Pardoning people convicted of marijuana possession (like Biden did)
You mean he pardoned a bunch of drug dealers who will now go back selling drugs to children?
Do you see the issue here? The justice system is to try to cut through the bias and selectively choosing which part of the justice outcomes to ignore is going to be extremely political.
Anything clearly obvious is usually resolved by higher courts so the pardons are completely for when the president just decides “fuck the law in this particular way”.
But, as usual, this is a case of false equivalency.
Can we agree that when violence results in penetration of the national seat of power, during the transfer of power, that changes from "civil unrest" to "insurrection"?
This is like saying "but your honor, fights happen all the time", when trying to defend yourself after robbing a bank.
I won't even go into the fact that there is ample evidence that it did not "just got violent". Even if not everyone came there to storm the senate, there is ample videographic proof of people arriving geared up and organized.
Now. Regarding those "bunch of drug dealers". In fact, Biden commuted the sentence of 1500 non-violent offenders so that their punishment was in line with the punishment they would receive today. He pardoned 49 people that mostly have already purged their sentence and today are productive members of society (and there were being kept back by their record)
Really. Spend two minutes reading through the list of pardons, and after reading about the lives of these people, then tell me if you still think those people will sell drugs to children.