Stavros
06-02-2018, 04:15 PM
I have not given a great deal of thought to this issue so would be interested to hear some views. What strikes me about the proposal to pardon Martha Stewart is not just that she broke the law -there is no miscarriage of justice here-, but that the rationale being given by the President is that she “used to be one of my biggest fans”. It seems to me this is fancy dress law not the real thing, a mockery of the justice system by a man who holds in low esteem anyway.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/may/31/dinesh-dsouza-pardon-trump-campaign-finance-guilty-plea
By contrast, with Obama there were 1,715 official pardons and commutations of sentence, most of them for people already on probation and often for minor crimes, with a large number of commutations at the end of his Presidency issued because President Obama believed too many Americans were being incarcerated in prison for minor crimes, something that, as one would now expect, the new Attorney General John Sessions has put into reverse, locking people up may be his favourite sport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_granted_executive_clemency_by_Barac k_Obama#December_3,_2010
I can understand a pardon for someone who has been wrongly convicted, but in that case and the cases where someone can be imprisoned for 'mutilating a coin' a Presidential pardon is not the answer, changing the law and sentencing is.
In the UK we have something called the Royal Prerogative of Mercy, that can be and has been used to pardon people convicted of serious crimes (paramilitaries involved in the conflict in Northern Ireland come to mind), but also pardons for convictions that took place as far back as the First World War -pardoning a soldier executed for cowardice- or the 1954 conviction of Alan Turing, which also led to an insert into the Policing and Crime Act of 2017 which expunged the convictions of gay men for crimes committed when Homosexuality was illegal (but does not include sex with minors).
This to me is a nonsense, you cannot pardon Turing, because he is dead, and we have since changed the law because the law was stupid. But the fact is that when he was convicted Turing was a criminal, and we should in fact always recall that and not try to dismiss it as an aberration of the times, when there are elements in our society who would, if they could, make it illegal again. It is the difference between the moral judgement of Alan Turing, and the Legal judgement.
And what about the million or more Black and Latino Americans with rap sheets that should be used for fancy dress? If pardoning, from a President or a Queen is to be just, who has the greatest need for justice? And will the President hear their case?
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/may/31/dinesh-dsouza-pardon-trump-campaign-finance-guilty-plea
By contrast, with Obama there were 1,715 official pardons and commutations of sentence, most of them for people already on probation and often for minor crimes, with a large number of commutations at the end of his Presidency issued because President Obama believed too many Americans were being incarcerated in prison for minor crimes, something that, as one would now expect, the new Attorney General John Sessions has put into reverse, locking people up may be his favourite sport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_granted_executive_clemency_by_Barac k_Obama#December_3,_2010
I can understand a pardon for someone who has been wrongly convicted, but in that case and the cases where someone can be imprisoned for 'mutilating a coin' a Presidential pardon is not the answer, changing the law and sentencing is.
In the UK we have something called the Royal Prerogative of Mercy, that can be and has been used to pardon people convicted of serious crimes (paramilitaries involved in the conflict in Northern Ireland come to mind), but also pardons for convictions that took place as far back as the First World War -pardoning a soldier executed for cowardice- or the 1954 conviction of Alan Turing, which also led to an insert into the Policing and Crime Act of 2017 which expunged the convictions of gay men for crimes committed when Homosexuality was illegal (but does not include sex with minors).
This to me is a nonsense, you cannot pardon Turing, because he is dead, and we have since changed the law because the law was stupid. But the fact is that when he was convicted Turing was a criminal, and we should in fact always recall that and not try to dismiss it as an aberration of the times, when there are elements in our society who would, if they could, make it illegal again. It is the difference between the moral judgement of Alan Turing, and the Legal judgement.
And what about the million or more Black and Latino Americans with rap sheets that should be used for fancy dress? If pardoning, from a President or a Queen is to be just, who has the greatest need for justice? And will the President hear their case?