In the first case to be decided concerning the pardoning power, Chief Justice Marshall, speaking for the Court, said: “As this power had been exercised from time immemorial by the executive of that nation whose language is our language, and to whose judicial institution ours bear a close resemblance; we adopt their principles respecting the operation and effect of a pardon, and look into their books for the rules prescribing the manner in which it is to be used by the person who would avail himself of it. A pardon is an act of grace, proceeding from the power entrusted with the execution of the laws, which exempts the individual, on whom it is bestowed, from the punishment the law inflicts for a crime he has committed. It is the private, though official act of the executive magistrate, delivered to the individual for whose benefit it is intended, and not communicated officially to the Court.... A pardon is a deed, to the validity of which delivery is essential, and delivery is not complete without acceptance. It may then be rejected by the person to whom it is tendered; and if it be rejected, we have discovered no power in a court to force it on him.” Marshall continued to hold that to be noticed judicially this deed must be pleaded, like any private instrument.234
In the case of Burdick v. United States,235 Marshall’s doctrine was put to a test that seems to have overtaxed it, perhaps fatally. Burdick, having declined to testify before a federal grand jury on the ground that his testimony would tend to incriminate him, was proffered by President Wilson “a full and unconditional pardon for all offenses against the United States,” which he might have committed or participated in in connection with the matter he had been questioned about. Burdick, nevertheless, refused to accept the pardon and persisted in his contumacy with the unanimous support of the Supreme Court. “The grace of a pardon,” remarked Justice McKenna sententiously, “may be only a pretense . . . involving consequences of even greater disgrace than those from which it purports to relieve. Circumstances may be made to bring innocence under the penalties of the law. If so brought, escape by confession of guilt implied in the acceptance of a pardon may be rejected ....”236 Nor did the Court give any attention to the fact that the President had accompanied his proffer to Burdick with a proclamation, although a similar procedure had been held to bring President Johnson’s amnesties to the Court’s notice.237 In 1927, however, in sustaining the right of the President to commute a sentence of death to one of life imprisonment, against the will of the prisoner, the Court abandoned this view. “A pardon in our days,” it said, “is not a private act of grace from an individual happening to possess power. It is a part of the constitutional scheme. When granted it is the determination of the ultimate authority that the public welfare will be better served by inflicting less than what the judgment fixed.”238 Whether these words sound the death knell of the acceptance doctrine is perhaps doubtful.239 They seem clearly to indicate that by substituting a commutation order for a deed of pardon, a President can always have his way in such matters, provided the substituted penalty is authorized by law and does not in common understanding exceed the original penalty.240
234 United States v. Wilson, 32 U.S. (7 Pet.) 150, 160-61 (1833).
235 236 U.S. 79, 86 (1915).
236 236 U.S. at 90-91.
237 Armstrong v. United States, 80 U.S. (13 Wall.) 154, 156 (1872). In Brown v. Walker, 161 U.S. 591 (1896), the Court had said: “It is almost a necessary corollary of the above propositions that, if the witness has already received a pardon, he cannot longer set up his privilege, since he stands with respect to such offence as if it had never been committed.” Id. at 599, citing British cases.
238 Biddle v. Perovich, 274 U.S. 480, 486 (1927).
239 Cf. W. HUMBERT, THE PARDONING POWER OF THE PRESIDENT 73 (1941).
240 Biddle v. Perovich, 274 U.S. 480, 486 (1927). In Schick v. Reed, 419 U.S. 256 (1976), the Court upheld the presidential commutation of a death sentence to imprisonment for life with no possibility of parole, the foreclosure of parole being contrary to the scheme of the Code of Military Justice. “The conclusion is inescapable that the pardoning power was intended to include the power to commute sentences on conditions which do not in themselves offend the Constitution, but which are not specifically provided for by statute.” Id. at 264.
The power embraces all “offences against the United States,” except cases of impeachment, and includes the power to remit fines, penalties, and forfeitures, except as to money covered into the Treasury or paid an informer,241 the power to pardon absolutely or conditionally, and the power to commute sentences, which, as seen above, is effective without the convict’s consent.242 It has been held, moreover, in face of earlier English practice, that indefinite suspension of sentence by a court of the United States is an invasion of the presidential prerogative, amounting as it does to a condonation of the offense.243 It was early assumed that the power included the power to pardon specified classes or communities wholesale, in short, the power to amnesty, which is usually exercised by proclamation. General amnesties were issued by Washington in 1795, by Adams in 1800, by Madison in 1815, by Lincoln in 1863, by Johnson in 1865, 1867, and 1868, and by the first Roosevelt—to Aguinaldo’s followers—in 1902.244 Not, however, till after the Civil War was the point adjudicated, when it was decided in favor of presidential prerogative.245
Offenses Against the United States; Contempt of Court.— In the first place, contempt of court offenses are not offenses against the United States. In the second place, they are completed offenses.246 The President cannot pardon by anticipation, otherwise he would be invested with the power to dispense with the laws, his claim to which was the principal cause of James II’s forced abdication.247 Lastly, the term has been held to include criminal contempts of court. Such was the holding in Ex parte Grossman,248 where Chief Justice Taft, speaking for the Court, resorted once more to English conceptions as being authoritative in construing this clause of the Constitution. Said he: “The King of England before our Revolution, in the exercise of his prerogative, had always exercised the power to pardon contempts of court, just as he did ordinary crimes and misdemeanors and as he has done to the present day. In the mind of a common law lawyer of the eighteenth century the word pardon included within its scope the ending by the King’s grace of the punishment of such derelictions, whether it was imposed by the court without a jury or upon indictment, for both forms of trial for contempts were had. [Citing cases.] These cases also show that, long before our Constitution, a distinction had been recognized at common law between the effect of the King’s pardon to wipe out the effect of a sentence for contempt insofar as it had been imposed to punish the contemnor for violating the dignity of the court and the King, in the public interest, and its inefficacy to halt or interfere with the remedial part of the court’s order necessary to secure the rights of the injured suitor. Blackstone IV, 285, 397, 398; Hawkins Pleas of the Crown, 6th Ed. (1787), Vol. 2, 553. The same distinction, nowadays referred to as the difference between civil and criminal contempts, is still maintained in English law.”249 Nor was any new or special danger to be apprehended from this view of the pardoning power. “If,” said the Chief Justice, “we could conjure up in our minds a President willing to paralyze courts by pardoning all criminal contempts, why not a President ordering a general jail delivery?” Indeed, he queried further, in view of the peculiarities of procedure in contempt cases, “may it not be fairly said that in order to avoid possible mistake, undue prejudice or needless severity, the chance of pardon should exist at least as much in favor of a person convicted by a judge without a jury as in favor of one convicted in a jury trial?”250
241 23 Ops. Atty. Gen. 360, 363 (1901); Illinois Cent. R.R. v. Bosworth, 133 U.S. 92 (1890).
242 Ex parte William Wells, 59 U.S. (18 How.) 307 (1856). For the contrary view, see some early opinions of the Attorney General, 1 Ops. Atty. Gen. 341 (1820); 2 Ops. Atty. Gen. 275 (1829); 5 Ops. Atty. Gen. 687 (1795); cf. 4 Ops. Atty. Gen. 458 (1845); United States v. Wilson, 32 U.S. (7 Pet.) 150, 161 (1833).
243 Ex parte United States, 242 U.S. 27 (1916). Amendment of sentence, however, within the same term of court, by shortening the term of imprisonment, although defendant had already been committed, is a judicial act and no infringement of the pardoning power. United States v. Benz, 282 U.S. 304 (1931).
244 See 1 J. Richardson, supra at 173, 293; 2 id. at 543; 7 id. at 3414, 3508; 8 id. at 3853; 14 id. at 6690.
245 United States v. Klein, 80 U.S. (13 Wall.) 128, 147 (1872). See also United States v. Padelford, 76 U.S. (9 Wall.) 531 (1870).
246 Ex parte Garland, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 333, 380 (1867).
247 F. MAITLAND, CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND 302-306 (1920); 1 Ops. Atty. Gen. 342 (1820). That is, the pardon may not be in anticipation of the commission of the offense. A pardon may precede the indictment or other beginning of the criminal proceeding, Ex parte Garland, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 333, 380 (1867), as indeed President Ford’s pardon of former President Nixon preceded institution of any action. On the Nixon pardon controversy, see Pardon of Richard M. Nixon and Related Matters: Hearings Before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, 93d Congress 2d Sess. (1974).
248 267 U.S. 87 (1925).
249 267 U.S. at 110-11.
250 267 U.S. at 121, 122.
Effects of a Pardon: Ex parte Garland.—The great leading case is Ex parte Garland,251 which was decided shortly after the Civil War. By an act passed in 1865, Congress had prescribed that before any person should be permitted to practice in a federal court he must take oath asserting that he had never voluntarily borne arms against the United States, had never given aid or comfort to enemies of the United States, and so on. Garland, who had been a Confederate sympathizer and so was unable to take the oath, had however received from President Johnson the same year “a full pardon ‘for all offences by him committed, arising from participation, direct or implied, in the Rebellion,’ . . .” The question before the Court was whether, armed with this pardon, Garland was entitled to practice in the federal courts despite the act of Congress just mentioned. Said Justice Field for a divided Court: “The inquiry arises as to the effect and operation of a pardon, and on this point all the authorities concur. A pardon reaches both the punishment prescribed for the offence and the guilt of the offender; and when the pardon is full, it releases the punishment and blots out of existence the guilt, so that in the eye of the law the offender is as innocent as if he had never committed the offence. If granted before conviction, it prevents any of the penalties and disabilities consequent upon conviction from attaching [thereto]; if granted after conviction, it removes the penalties and disabilities, and restores him to all his civil rights; it makes him, as it were, a new man, and gives him a new credit and capacity.”252
Justice Miller, speaking for the minority, protested that the act of Congress involved was not penal in character, but merely laid down an appropriate test of fitness to practice law. “The man who, by counterfeiting, by theft, by murder, or by treason, is rendered unfit to exercise the functions of an attorney or counsellor at law, may be saved by the executive pardon from the penitentiary or the gallows, but he is not thereby restored to the qualifications which are essential to admission to the bar.”253 Justice Field’s language must today be regarded as much too sweeping in light of a decision rendered in 1914 in the case of Carlesi v. New York.254 Carlesi had been convicted several years before of committing a federal offense. In the instant case, the prisoner was being tried for a subsequent offense committed in New York. He was convicted as a second offender, although the President had pardoned him for the earlier federal offense. In other words, the fact of prior conviction by a federal court was considered in determining the punishment for a subsequent state offense. This conviction and sentence were upheld by the Supreme Court. While this case involved offenses against different sovereignties, the Court declared by way of dictum that its decision “must not be understood as in the slightest degree intimating that a pardon would operate to limit the power of the United States in punishing crimes against its authority to provide for taking into consideration past offenses committed by the accused as a circumstance of aggravation even although for such past offenses there had been a pardon granted.”255
251 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 333, 381 (1867).
252 71 U.S. at 380.
253 71 U.S. at 396-97.
254 233 U.S. 51 (1914).
Limits to the Efficacy of a Pardon.—But Justice Field’s latitudinarian view of the effect of a pardon undoubtedly still applies ordinarily where the pardon is issued before conviction. He is also correct in saying that a full pardon restores a convict to his “civil rights,” and this is so even though simple completion of the convict’s sentence would not have had that effect. One such right is the right to testify in court, and in Boyd v. United States, the Court held that the disability to testify being a consequence, according to principles of the common law, of the judgment of conviction, the pardon obliterated that effect.256 But a pardon cannot “make amends for the past. It affords no relief for what has been suffered by the offender in his person by imprisonment, forced labor, or otherwise; it does not give compensation for what has been done or suffered, nor does it impose upon the government any obligation to give it. The offence being established by judicial proceedings, that which has been done or suffered while they were in force is presumed to have been rightfully done and justly suffered, and no satisfaction for it can be required. Neither does the pardon affect any rights which have vested in others directly by the execution of the judgment for the offence, or which have been acquired by others whilst that judgment was in force. If, for example, by the judgment a sale of the offender’s property has been had, the purchaser will hold the property notwithstanding the subsequent pardon. And if the proceeds of the sale have been paid to a party to whom the law has assigned them, they cannot be subsequently reached and recovered by the offender. The rights of the parties have become vested, and are as complete as if they were acquired in any other legal way. So, also, if the proceeds have been paid into the treasury, the right to them has so far become vested in the United States that they can only be secured to the former owner of the property through an act of Congress. Moneys once in the treasury can only be withdrawn by an appropriation by law.”257
255 233 U.S. at 59.
256 142 U.S. 450 (1892).
257 Knote v. United States, 95 U.S. 149, 153-154 (1877).
Congress cannot limit the effects of a presidential amnesty. Thus the act of July 12, 1870, making proof of loyalty necessary to recover property abandoned and sold by the Government during the Civil War, notwithstanding any executive proclamation, pardon, amnesty, or other act of condonation or oblivion, was pronounced void. Said Chief Justice Chase for the majority: “[T]he legislature cannot change the effect of such a pardon any more than the executive can change a law. Yet this is attempted by the provision under consideration. The Court is required to receive special pardons as evidence of guilt and to treat them as null and void. It is required to disregard pardons granted by proclamation on condition, though the condition has been fulfilled, and to deny them their legal effect. This certainly impairs the executive authority and directs the Court to be instrumental to that end.”258 On the other hand, Congress itself, under the necessary and proper clause, may enact amnesty laws remitting penalties incurred under the national statutes.259
258 United States v. Klein, 80 U.S. (13 Wall.) 128, 143, 148 (1872).
259 The Laura, 114 U.S. 411 (1885).
Last modified: June 9, 2014