Donald Trump's significant increase in presidential pardons during his second term has attracted intense lobbying efforts, with millions of dollars being offered to secure clemency for wealthy convicted clients.According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump's pardon activity stands in stark contrast to...
drug crimes, for example… if the US govt decided selling weed is all of a sudden no longer a crime, that doesn’t automatically release people from prison
or if someone did something technically illegal, but the circumstance around it made it clearly the moral choice (perhaps something like whistleblowers)
the world is messy and no law perfectly covers all bases… pardons are the same as prosecutorial or police discretion. in an ideal world, the harshness of the law should be tempered by morality of the individuals at many levels
of course that falls apart when the morality at every level is non existent, but that is legitimate purpose/reason. imo the discussion shouldn’t be about the overall legitimacy of the powers themselves, but in the trade-offs and lack of real protections from abuse, or who gets to have a say in those things
I still don’t see a good reason you couldn’t go through a bill, running in front of congress, for this, as well as the Vietnam draft dodgers mentioned above.
I still don’t see a good reason you couldn’t go through a bill, running in front of congress, for this, as well as the Vietnam draft dodgers mentioned above.
because entire laws aren’t meant to handle individual cases. making laws is slow and laborious, and is meant to cover the broad strokes
the real fix is to have a panel or something, similar to how you have judges etc now, and i’m sure there are other solutions
the fact that the currently implementation is rife with abuse - and only pretty recently at that - isn’t a reason the whole thing shouldn’t exist (which is what the thread was about)