I must respectfully differ from @jacobsullum’s take.

Bread is good, but that doesn’t mean bread and circuses are good.

/1 https://twitter.com/jacobsullum/status/1351774748070522880

/2 The President’s pardon power gives you a substantial chance of your sentence being reduced or wiped out —

—-if you were a famous politician, rich and famous businessperson, or prominent political operative.

For everyone else it’s like playing the lottery.

/3 Is it good that the specific people Jacob mention received mercy? Yes. But how do we view that mercy? It’s not systematic or consistent. It’s a minuscule percentage of similarly situated people unjustly confined. They won the lottery.

/4 The Presidential pardon of a handful of deserving poor people resembles the (possibly made-up) Paschal Pardon described in the Bible — the ritual, symbolic, occasion-commemorating pardon of someone, a religious/cultural gesture.

/5 The way that deserving people get struck by this particular lightning — by the intercession of saint-like, otherworldly celebrities - merely reinforces this comparison.

/6 The problem is that the Presidential pardon is a symbolic, quasi-religious gesture of mercy toward the downtrodden designed to keep us complacent about the other 99.99999999% percent of them. It’s the sovereign raining generosity on one lucky wretched person to placate all.

/7 So: i dissent that the Presidential pardon, at least as used in recent memory, is praiseworthy when it vastly disproportionately helps the powerful and helps an infinitesimal percentage of the deserving in an attempt to make us forget the rest. /end