Hacker News

We should go as far as to preemptively ban and sanction any POTUS who says "I'm going to pardon these people before I leave office".

There's no reason to say that unless you know they're actively committing federal crimes in the present day.

I agree. I dont care if “my guy” or “your guy” does it, it should not be allowed.

There are two types here: (1) Pardons for crimes not yet committed. (2) Pardons for crimes committed, but not yet convicted. The first type will allow the pardoned to commit a crime in the future for free, which obviously should not be allowed. The second should be allowed if we have this pardon system at all.

The second type became a political necessity, for example to protect Liz Cheney from a vengeful administration.

There is no universe where any pardon is abolished unless there is a massive political shakeup. The entrenched political class is terrified of endangering their power and privilege even if individual players are ready to do it.

The preemptive pardon is ridiculous. Pardon for what? What if it comes out someone is a child cannibal? Are they pardoned for that?

So I have mixed feeling on this.

I'm thinking of Carter fulfilling a campaign pledge to pardon draft dodgers. Whether you support that or not, he did what he said he was going to do and I'm sure only some of them had actually been charged in any way. I think that's a perfectly fine use for the pardon power.

Some will point to the Hunter Biden pardon. So two things can be true at once here: it was absolutely political prosecution AND Joe Biden was completely selfish with his action. At least do something for the people by, say, pardoning a whole bunch of low level drug offenders and decriminalize cannabis at the Federal level. But no, it was completely self-serving but his brain was pretty much gone by this point.

Here's the problem: Federal prosecutors have a ton of power. Conviction rates are 98-99%. But it goes beyond that. Federal prosecutors will intentionally bankrupt you to force you to take a plea. They might charge you with 15 felonies, 12 of which are basically bogus. You still have to defend those bogus felonies and that costs you money. And as soon as you run out of money, they'll offer you a plea where you're looking at 25 years on the 3 remaining felonies or you can just take 10.

The power imbalance is insane and the wealthy are essentially immune. If a US attorney decides to make an example of you, you're going to have a bad time, regardless of the facts.

Millions were spent dredging up some crimes for Hunter Biden and pretty much all they could come up with was doing crack and filling out a form incorrectly. Do you think anyone else would get that level of attention?

A very recent example of this is the Karen Read trial or, as I call it, the most expensive DUI prosecution in history. If you didn't follow the case, don't worry, there'll be any number of true crime documentaries. Millions were spent prosecuting Karen Read for killing JOhn O'Keefe with a completely ridiculous theory of the case and all sorts of evidence that went missing (including police officers disposing of their cell phones on a military base the day before an electronics preservation order was issued).

I don't know what we do about this power imbalance and selective prosecution.

Interesting story, but I do not see her name in the list of pardons and commutations on the source website twice.

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/commutations-granted-presiden...

She only shows up here

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-grants-president-don...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_Richard_Nixon

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-4311-...

> Now, Therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.

Not quite as long, but much more significant. (No violence exception, the criminal was the President, and they were crimes against the entire country, not some random drug/tax charges.)

So this was the first time (i think) anyone got a preemptive pardon, the actual warrant on the DOJ website says what it says.. https://www.justice.gov/pardon/media/1385756/dl?inline

Will have to crunch through the offenses in the db and see if anything else like this shows up.

Look at what the Trump administration has done with the DOJ pursuing unwarranted indictments against anyone Trump doesn't like. All getting thrown out so far. And you lead with questioning why one of his constant targets would pardon his family? The bigger question is why this isn't more outrage at the GOP attempts to find something on Biden or Clinton. They have been wasting tax dollars while Coomer "investigates" for something that he has never been able to prove. I'd have pardoned everyone around me given that constant sustained and terrible attack. All the while the Trump grift machine continues without so much as a blink.

Most likely that domain was already taken.

Pardon me, but this is a list of pardons given to pardoned people.

I'd presumed this was a wordplay on Donald Trump.

The Pardon is a structural check on the legislative and judiciary. It cannot be done away with safely without causing massive problems down the road. If anything, this should be a learning experience for the country not to put criminally inclined presidents in office.

On the bright side, if they get pardoned they can't plead the fifth and can be forced to testify against anyone not pardoned.

As long as they can still pardon the turkey.

[dead]

The Obama number is also high because the designer combined Obama's first and second terms into one figure, unlike what he did with the other presidents who served two terms.

A bunch of mass commutations have occurred under Obama, Biden, and most recently under Trump, I'm working on a comparison tool, so we can visualize the change in number of pardons by president, further breakdown of composition is an interesting idea as well.

I'm pretty sure the numbers are going up simply because 1) 90s sentencing laws got insanely strict and prisons are full of old guys serving inflated sentences, 2) drug laws eventually became more lax and people are in prison for things that aren't even criminal any more, and 3) prisons have simply run out of space and it's easier to release people than build more.

This kind of topic is bound to bring up a lot of outrage, but I'd invite people to remember it's the Marc Richs of the old buying pardons that you should be directing that toward. There are plenty of people locked up for a very long time who really don't deserve it. I recall a Chumash woman I worked with at the LA County Museum of Natural History 24 years ago. I gave her a ride home a few times and eventually realized I was taking her to a halfway house, and it came out that the FBI has busted her in the early 90s for criminal conspiracy and her only actual offense was refusing to testify against her husband, who'd been selling marijuana on their reservation under the logic that he didn't believe US law should apply because of the historical treaties about tribal land. She did 10 years in federal prison for that.

That disclaimer is there for now to make it clear that we're not showing that data yet. I need to figure out how to show the mass commutations done by Biden as well.

Working on a comparison tool, so we can see # of pardons over admins, it seems the number of pardons has been going up each administration.

Thanks for the heads up on that.. there's a lot of massaging/cross checking that still needs to be done. Right now the numbers are based purely on what the sentence is described on the DOJ website.

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-grants-president-don...

cmd-f trevor milton .. if the text for the sentence column doesn't say anything about a fine or restitution the system is not going to be able to figure that out.

The numbers for the prison time reduced is also technically incorrect, Ross Ulbricht, Rod Blagojevich and many others had already served many years in prison, so technically we should not count that as time reduced.

i am calculating it if it's available in the sentence details. If the sentence details don't have a fine or restitution then we can't calculate it.

https://pardonned.com/search/?president=obama-2&categories=d...

I haven’t looked into each case here, but I assume these are a bunch of non-violent drug offenders serving years and decade-long sentences. I see 30 years for “possession with intent to distribute”. That’s just crazy.

When the justice system is clearly broken, it’s ok to subvert it.

There's some value to "the President can correct some wrongs". There are genuine miscarriages of justice sometimes and it's kinda nice to have a release valve for them.

The recent presidential immunity decision just made the downsides way more likely.

Justice is a moving target mate. Should people who had a few pounds of reefer still be serving 30 year sentences? 90's adults would probably say yes. Today? Not so much. Part of being human is being open to the fact you were wrong. The Pardon is the release valve that lets the Chief Executive remove the targets the System has painted on people's backs in response to a clear shift in public conscience. The public in recent history, through all prudence to the wind and put a con man in office. Surprise, surprise when a con man uses the office to do what con men do.

It’s an alternative to coups and civil wars. The deal made in private conversations is something like “Give up power peacefully. Everybody gets pardoned and goes home to their families. Nobody needs to do anything crazy or violent out of desperation to avoid prison.”