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"The President . . . shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment."
(Article II, Section 2, Clause 1)
The power to pardon is one of the least limited powers granted to the President in the Constitution. The only limits mentioned in the Constitution are that pardons are limited to offenses against the United States (i.e., not civil or state cases), and that they cannot affect an impeachment process. A reprieve is the commutation or lessening of a sentence already imposed; it does not affect the legal guilt of a person. A pardon, however, completely wipes out the legal effects of a conviction. A pardon can be issued from the time an offense is committed, and can even be issued after the full sentence has been served. It cannot, however, be granted before an offense has been committed, which would give the President the power to waive the laws.
The presidential power to pardon was derived from the royal English Prerogative of Kings, which dated from before the Norman invasion. The royal power was absolute, and the king often granted a pardon in exchange for money or military service. Parliament tried unsuccessfully to limit the king's pardon power, and finally it succeeded to some degree in 1701 when it passed the Act of Settlement, which exempted impeachment from the royal pardon power.
During the period of the Articles of Confederation, the state constitutions conferred pardon powers of varying scopes on their governors, but neither the New Jersey Plan nor the Virginia Plan presented at the Constitutional Convention included a pardon power for the chief executive. On May 29, 1787, Charles Pinckney introduced a proposal to give the chief executive the same pardon power as enjoyed by English monarchs, that is, complete power with the exception of impeachment. Some delegates argued that treason should be excluded from the pardon power. George Mason argued that the President's pardon power "may be sometimes exercised to screen from punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the crime and thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt." James Wilson answered that pardons for treason should be available and successfully argued that the power would be best used by the President. Impeachment was available if the President himself was involved in the treason. A proposal for Senate approval of presidential pardons was also defeated.
The development of the use of the pardon power reflects its several purposes. One purpose is to temper justice with mercy in appropriate cases, and to do justice if new or mitigating evidence comes to bear on a person who may have been wrongfully convicted. Alexander Hamilton reflects this in The Federalist No. 74, in which he argues that "humanity and good policy" require that "the benign prerogative of pardoning" was necessary to mitigate the harsh justice of the criminal code. The pardon power would provide for "exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt."
Chief Justice John Marshall in United States v. Wilson (1833) also commented on the benign aspects of the pardon power: "A pardon is an act of grace, proceeding from the power entrusted with the execution of the laws, which exempts the individual, on whom it is bestowed from the punishment the law inflicts for a crime he has committed. It is the private, though official act of the executive magistrate…." Another purpose of the pardon power focuses not on obtaining justice for the person pardoned, but rather on the public-policy purposes of the government. For instance, James Wilson argued during the Convention that "pardon before conviction might be necessary in order to obtain the testimony of accomplices." The public-policy purposes of the pardon were echoed by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Biddle v. Perovich (1927): "A pardon in our days is not a private act of grace from an individual happening to possess power. It is a part of the constitutional scheme."........
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