Western civilization has always encouraged anyone in a position of authority to “temper…Justice with Mercie.”[REF] “The extraordinary power to grant clemency,” which is an integral part of this tradition, “allows a chief executive to play God on this side of the River Styx by forgiving an offender’s sins or remitting his punishment.”[REF] Clemency was a settled feature of English common law[REF] and a feature of criminal justice during the early days of our nation.[REF] The Framers saw a host of benefits in being able to extend offenders “forgiveness, release, [and] remission”[REF] from a conviction or punishment,[REF] and they vested that prerogative in the President by Article II of the Constitution.[REF]
Criticisms of the Federal Clemency Process
Of late, however, the federal clemency process has come under considerable criticism.[REF] Three charges in particular stand out. The first one is that Presidents have granted clemency too infrequently for it to serve its most beneficial and needed goal: expressing forgiveness and wiping the slate clean for an offender, particularly one who is simply an average person rather than a celebrity, who has admitted his wrongdoing and who has turned his life around.[REF] Consider President Barack Obama. He commuted the terms of imprisonment imposed on more than 1,700 offenders whom he believed received unduly stiff sentences under the federal drug laws, but neither he nor his predecessors over the past three-plus decades have pardoned offenders at the rate that we saw for most of our prior history.[REF] President Donald Trump should renew a hallowed tradition.
The second fault is that Presidents have used their clemency power in dishonorable ways, such as repaying old political debts or making new political allies.[REF] Bill Clinton is Exhibit A (and B). He offered conditional commutations to the members of a Puerto Rican terrorist group, very possibly to enlist the support of the Puerto Rican community for Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate race and Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign. He also granted pardons and commutations during his last 24 hours in office to cronies, people with White House connections, or individuals who had contributed to his party or presidential library.[REF] Such a tawdry practice dishonors a noble, revered criminal justice instrument.
The first and second criticisms focus on the actions of our Presidents, and it may not be possible to answer them without improving the character of the people we elect to that office.[REF] The third criticism, however, targets a structural flaw in the federal clemency process: the doorkeeping role played by the Department of Justice.[REF]
The President relies on the Justice Department to filter out ineligible applicants[REF] and to recommend from the remainder which ones should receive clemency in some form or other, whether a pardon, commutation of sentence, rescission of a fine or forfeiture, general amnesty, or merely a stay in the execution of sentence.[REF] The problem with that arrangement, however, is that the Justice Department suffers from an actual or apparent conflict of interest.
The Department of Justice is effectively an adversary to each applicant because it prosecuted every one of them.[REF] That fact creates a serious risk that the department would be unlikely to look neutrally and dispassionately on an offender’s claim that he should never have been charged with a crime; that he is innocent; that there was a prejudicial error in his proceedings; that his sentence was unduly severe; or that for some other reason, such as his post-conviction conduct, he should be excused or his conduct forgiven.[REF] In any other decision-making process, critics maintain, a neutral party would play the role now performed by the department to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. The department should remain free to offer a recommendation as to whether the President should award clemency to a particular applicant, but it should not be in a position where it can decline to forward to the White House applications that a reasonable person would support.[REF]
The President represents the nation when making clemency judgments. He is entitled to receive unbiased recommendations, and the nation is entitled to believe that those decisions are based on their merits. Granting the Justice Department a privileged position in the clemency process cannot provide the necessary confidence that those goals will be achieved.
Potential Remedies
A Clemency Board. One proposed remedy for this problem would be for Congress to create an independent, multimember advisory board like the U.S. Sentencing Commission that would review every clemency application and offer the President its recommendations.[REF] By being independent of the Justice Department, the board would avoid the conflict of interest afflicting the latter. By being a collegial entity, the board could include a broad range of people—former law enforcement officials, defense attorneys, members of the clergy, criminologists, and so forth—with the types of diverse backgrounds and perspectives that best represent the varied opinions of the American public on clemency. The President, the applicant, and the public, the argument concludes, would be well served by such a commission.
A formal clemency board created by statute, however, would pose several problems for the President that he would rather avoid.[REF] Principal among them would be the risk that the board or some of its members would use its existence and mission as a political platform to criticize a President’s general clemency philosophy or individual decisions. That is a risk even if the President himself can freely select and remove board members, but the risk becomes a certainty once Congress becomes involved. In any implementing legislation, Congress might demand, expressly or impliedly, the right for each chamber and party to select a certain number of board members or at least to have a role in approving commission members.[REF] Politics would inevitably come to play a role in the board’s decisions as members campaigned for clemency to be awarded for certain types of offenses (e.g., street crimes vs. white-collar crimes vs. drug crimes); to certain types of offenders (e.g., offenders identified by race, ethnicity, income level, and so forth); or to certain types of constituents (e.g., rural vs. suburban vs. urban offenders).
There is no legal or moral justification for using a spoils system to decide whether someone deserves forgiveness.[REF] Besides, the President could always establish his own advisory board if he believed that it would be helpful. Just as the President does not dictate to Congress whether it should use committees and subcommittees to decide how to legislate, Congress should not dictate to the President whether he should use an advisory board to execute one of his prerogatives.
The Vice President. A better alternative would be for the President to move the Office of the Pardon Attorney into the Executive Office of the President and use the Vice President as his principal clemency adviser.[REF] Unlike the Attorney General, the Vice President would be seen as impartial. He has no law enforcement responsibility and so lacks an institutional conflict of interest.
The Vice President also enjoys several institutional and practical benefits shared by no one else in the executive branch. He is a constitutional officer who serves the same four-year term as the President, which is generally longer than most Attorneys General serve. He has the stature necessary to referee disputes between White House Clemency Office staff and Justice Department officials, even if one of the latter is the Attorney General. He has ideal access to the President because he has an office in the West Wing. His judgment would be valuable to the President, particularly if he had served previously as a governor, because he would have made clemency decisions in that role.
There are, of course, occasions in which the President might value the opinions of someone else more than those of the Vice President. The classic example occurred when the Attorney General—Robert Kennedy—was the brother of the President—John Kennedy. But those scenarios may be few and far between. That one, after all, has not reappeared in the 50-plus years since it first occurred. Until then, it makes sense for the President to rely on the Vice President as the head of a White House Clemency Office and the President’s principal clemency adviser.
Conclusion
The Vice President can offer the President several benefits in the clemency decision-making process that no one else in the government possesses. President Donald Trump should seriously consider using Vice President Mike Pence as his principal clemency adviser. Trump, future Presidents, clemency applicants, and the public would all benefit from that new arrangement.
—Paul J. Larkin, Jr., is Senior Legal Research Fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, of the Institute for Constitutional Government, at The Heritage Foundation.
