Abolish pardons as presently done and start a new system, Part Two

The haystack arrived today. The needles are coming soon.

In this post, I argued that the present system for federal clemency, under which the President can pardon or commute the sentence of anyone for any federal offense at any time for any reason, is unwise, subject to abuse, and in need of change. Not all readers were on board with me, so I thought I would put forward some evidence that arrived just today (although it was plenty predictable). Hence the Washington Post presents us with this story:

[Today, the President] commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 people convicted of crimes in what the White House says is the “largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history.”

Was any of them factually innocent? Not that I’ve been able to find, and not that is even being claimed. But it was for the most part “just” drugs, dontcha know (after, in Biden’s term, drug overdose deaths were over 100,000 three years running for the first time in American history).

He might not be done: Biden is getting pressure to pardon people on death row and is considering offering preemptive pardons for President-elect Donald Trump’s critics.

I don’t know whether Biden is planning on bailing out murderers, as the Post’s article seems to suggest, but I do know that abolition of the death penalty is extremely popular with his base (and some libertarians), and the base is starving for something to celebrate from this failed presidency (and from Biden/Harris’s having so badly booted the election). I also know, as do Ringside readers, that Biden is planning on giving pre-emptive cover to his political allies, perhaps by the hundreds (again, the pardon power has no limit). The pretext is that Trump, apparently through a magical process that excludes the courts, is going to send them to prison, but actual reason is that Biden wants them to face no accountability regardless of what they might or might not have done — a subject of zero interest that I’ve been to detect in either the White House or the press.

Individual consideration of facts is out, and giving the proverbial finger to the electorate that chose Trump, and more importantly to the country and the country’s remaining faith in the criminal justice system — such as it may be after Democratic heroes Jack Smith, Kristen Clarke, Alvin Bragg, etc. — is in.

The Post did do us the favor of giving at least a few details about the death row inmates Biden is considering for clemency.

Forty people are on federal death row, including the gunman who killed nine Black parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber and the attacker who gunned down 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue. All three were sentenced to death when Biden served as president or vice president.

All these people were given death sentences after what is almost certainly the most careful, elaborate and painstaking legal safeguards the world has ever seen. But as things stand with the limitless pardon power we have now, Joe Biden, a man with obviously limited mental capacity, even more limited moral capacity, and no remaining political accountability, can give them all a break.

Some might call this compassion. It is no such thing. It’s a scandal, a snickering slap at the families of the victims, and an intentional affront to a judicial system that has spent 200 years learning to balance lenity with accountability.

There is a place for lenity, as I said in my first post on this subject. But no sensate person could think it should be for, e.g., Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, among the others Biden is considering for clemency.

Rather than gauzy meandering about what Biden and his crowd call “second chances,” we need to think about what Tsarnaev did to his victims. I talked about one of them in my death penalty debate at Cornell Law School this last fall:

This was the coroner's recounting, in part:

"The bomb severed [the victim's] spinal cord and abdominal aorta; severed and exposed his lower intestines; ruptured his stomach; tore his liver, left kidney and adrenal gland; nearly tore off his left arm at the forearm; snapped a bone in his right leg; fractured and exposed his ribs; and bruised a lung.

[The victim] had third-degree burns on his back, buttocks and left calf. His body was covered with cuts, bruises and perforations from blast debris."

The victim’s name was Martin Richard. This is his picture about a month before he was blown apart:

He weighed 69 pounds and was eight years old. Like many boys of that age, he dreamed of being a professional baseball player. He was wiped out before he was old enough to try out for Little League.

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Allowing unlimited clemency power to someone with the mental and moral compass of Joe Biden, and even worse Presidents who for all we know will at some point follow him, is all wrong. We need to change it — change it for much more compelling reasons than merely its political stench.