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This could not be a dumber take. We need far more mercy in our cruel, barbaric, all too often unjust system, and executive clemency is embedded into the Constitution for exactly that purpose. A handful of misuses of this critical corrective mechanism is not reason to abolish it https://twitter.com/chrismurphyct/status/1341911437485240323
Part of the reason these Trump pardons feel more pointed is because the use of pardon power by presidents has dwindled so dramatically in recent years but it wasn't always this way.
Historically, clemency was used frequently, with every president pardoning thousands of people up until the time of President Gerald Ford. (Listen to the great @jduffyrice and @ClintSmithIII talk about this exact point here https://theappeal.org/justice-in-america-episode-18-what-happened-to-clemency/)
Thomas Jefferson pardoned everyone who had been convicted under the Sedition Act, Abraham Lincoln pardoned hundreds of members of the Dakota Tribe, all previously sentenced to death for killing white Americans who tried to take their land.
Lincoln also once received an envelope from a general containing the cases of 55 people convicted of desertion. Lincoln simply wrote “pardoned” on the envelope and returned it to the general. And that was that.
In times of war, presidents have used their pardon power to help bind the nation’s wounds. After the Civil War, masses of former Confederate soldiers were granted amnesty.
And as the Vietnam War drew to a close, President Ford set up a commission to grant conditional amnesty to draft dodgers and military deserters, forgiving tens of thousands of people for those offenses.
President Jimmy Carter expand effort to hundreds of thousands of draft dodgers. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who granted the most pardons and commutations of any president, issued clemency to 3,000 people.
What's worse is this call for abolition of the pardon power, due to a rich, corrupt, cruel president misusing it for a handful of his rich, corrupt, cruel friends will harm the most vulnerable the most, people who have already been harmed by the cruelest & most corrupt systems
