« SSRN: Any Limits? | Main | Westboro Baptist and marriage equality »

Monday, February 04, 2013

Reforming the Pardon Attorney Office: Some Preliminary Thoughts

I'm home now, after a few days in NYC last week, where Eric Johnson (Illinois) and Rachel Barkow (NYU) presented drafts at the crim law theory colloquium. Rachel's cool paper lays out the case for moving control over federal prison, foresenics and clemency policy outside of the DOJ. You can find an early draft on SSRN and I think it's coming out later this year in Va L Rev. The discussion with others about Rachel's paper got me thinking again about the federal pardon office in particular and whether (or how) governments should dispense mercy. Because of the recent NYT editorial on clemency reform, there are a number of folks and organizations urgently interested in reform of the Office of the Pardon Attorney. This is in part because Obama's record on distributing pardons is especially low when compared to other recent presidents. (Rachel's paper provides data on that; former pardon attorney Margy Love has been a one-woman crusader on that front too.) Unlike Rachel or Margy, I won't say Obama's record low number of pardons is necessarily stingy. That conclusion presupposes too much to reach that assessment, though I can imagine I might reach the same conclusion if I had the time to review all the petitions myself.

And that goes to my main point. It seems to me that if we're going to have reform of the Pardon Attorney's office, one thing we should try to do is unpack the reasons for clemency to better facilitate understanding and democratic accountability. Often the word clemency is used in broad-brushed ways, and by using it without care or precision, we lose the opportunity to move the conversation forward in useful ways. Accordingly, if we are going to reform the Pardon Attorney's office, and if states are interested in similar developments, then we should at least do our best to shape sites for clemency in ways that are honest even if they are not meant to do (only) justice.

Specifically, clemency sites like the executive pardon can be used to advance justice in its retributive texture. These are the easier cases for clemency and they arise when executive branch officials have substantial doubts about the accuracy of the conviction now, or perhaps because they believe the punishment is too severe (in relation to the offender's moral or legal desert). When officials are faced with classic Type I errors, these clemency sites are attractive and necessary because of the way in which they can be used to reduce or correct such errors--and they are especially attractive when decisions are subjected to some kind of deferential review--as I have argued.

In addition to promoting justice and correcting injustices, clemency sites like the Pardon Attorney could also be used to advance mercy, understood as I roughly defined it once (somewhat controversially), as leniency motivated by compassion, redemption, grace, caprice or bias. Thus, when pardons are bestowed because of a person's post-conviction heroic deeds, or because Christmas is coming, or because the offender has come to Jesus, or because the person's family is close to the President, then such dispensations of leniency should be identified as mercy with particular explanations offered for the leniency.* Here, the decision is made to extend leniency independent of its putative benefits toward crime control.

Finally, clemency sites such as the Pardon Power could also be used to advance straightforward policy goals regarding individual prevention and crime control. On this view, pardons are a way to address and scale back punishments that are unnecessary with respect to the threats posed by particular offenders. Perhaps this offender is no longer a sex offender threat because he has voluntarily sought chemical castration and otherwise completed all treatments; perhaps that violent offender has become an invalid through an accident he suffered while in prison. With this goal of individual prevention in mind, the Pardon Attorney could be used as a space (especially in a world without parole) to re-assess threats of dangerousness that earlier motivated officials to apply a custodial or otherwise onerous sanction that is no longer required from a social self-defense perspective.

Again, I'm not saying I necessarily endorse or oppose all pardons that are merciful or prospectively utilitarian from an individual prevention perspective, but I know that others are attracted to those kinds of pardons. It seems to me that if we're going to have a pardon attorney perform any role related to remitting punishments, it would be a good idea if we could determine which box the President thought a particular offender's petition for clemency belonged in, and why. I doubt that too many people make their ultimate decisions about who to support politically based on who receives clemency and why, but if we do think the Office of the Pardon Attorney has fallen into unjustified dis-use, it might be because such decision-making has in the past been inadequately sorted and scrutinized. Justice, mercy, and prospective utility would be a first pass attempt at trying to get the Pardon attorney, and offices like it at the state level, to think more sure-footedly about what they are doing and why.

*My published and probably still current view is that leniency motivated by any of these mercy reasons are all problematic even if not equally so from the perspective of retributive justice or liberalism properly understood. But my own view on this doesn't matter for the limited purposes of trying to come up with reforms of the Pardon attorney. I understand that not everyone is a retributivist or even a liberal and that some folks want the law to have spaces for interstitial discretion that redounds to the benefit of defendants--even if those benefits cannot be justified on their own feet but rather in service to some other good such as the desire to simply have less punishment. 

Posted by Administrators on February 4, 2013 at 02:36 PM in Article Spotlight, Constitutional thoughts, Criminal Law, Dan Markel | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c6a7953ef017ee83825a6970d

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Reforming the Pardon Attorney Office: Some Preliminary Thoughts:

Comments

Nope, that was pure oversight, Paul. Thanks:-)
Thinking out loud about that, it would seem that would be a good 4th and maybe 5th box--adding those would have the benefit of spurring dialogue across the branches, etc, and would at the same time have to be done sparingly lest it look like the executive branch doesn't like to, you know, execute the laws faithfully.

I suppose one could argue that such disagreements could also be smuggled under the "justice" box, or maybe even the mercy box, but if we're going with transparency/honesty/explanation as important democratic virtues here, I think you're right to suggest that leniency extended for such reasons should be disentangled from justice or mercy. (Query whether leniency based on a desire to address the 100-1 crack-powder cocaine problem should be characterized as justice or policy disagreement or both).

Fwiw, it seems that the policy and constitutional disagreement boxes should probably be separated from each other. E.g., a POTUS who argues that enforcement of a law is unconstitutional on 1A or other grounds might want to reserve his/her ability to say, I'm sorry, I like the law on policy grounds but it's inappropriate for me as a constitutional officer to enforce.

Again, good and important point. Thanks--I plan on stealing it if this blog post morphs into something else, perhaps an SSRN paper for Grimmelmann!

Posted by: Dan Markel | Feb 4, 2013 6:55:14 PM

Curious: did you deliberately leave out policy/constitutional disagreement with the law a pardonee was convicted under (sedition acts etc.)?

Posted by: Paul Gowder | Feb 4, 2013 5:34:59 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.