INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U.S. 289, 57 (2001)

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Cite as: 533 U. S. 289 (2001)

Scalia, J., dissenting

execution of this deportation squarely on the Attorney General, where Congress has put it." Id., at 271.

III

Given the insubstantiality of the due process and Article III arguments against barring judicial review of respondent's claim (the Court does not even bother to mention them, and the Court of Appeals barely acknowledges them), I will address them only briefly.

The Due Process Clause does not "[r]equir[e] [j]udicial [d]etermination [o]f" respondent's claim, Brief for Petitioners in Calcano-Martinez v. INS, O. T. 2000, No. 00-1011, p. 34. Respondent has no legal entitlement to suspension of deportation, no matter how appealing his case. "[T]he Attorney General's suspension of deportation [is] "an act of grace" which is accorded pursuant to her 'unfettered discretion,' Jay v. Boyd, 351 U. S. 345, 354 (1956) . . . , and [can be likened, as Judge Learned Hand observed,] to "a judge's power to suspend the execution of a sentence, or the President's to pardon a convict," 351 U. S., at 354, n. 16 . . . ." INS v. Yueh-Shaio Yang, 519 U. S. 26, 30 (1996). The furthest our cases have gone in imposing due process requirements upon analogous exercises of Executive discretion is the following. (1) We have required "minimal procedural safeguards" for death-penalty clemency proceedings, to prevent them from becoming so capricious as to involve "a state official flipp[ing] a coin to determine whether to grant clemency," Ohio Adult Parole Authority v. Woodard, 523 U. S. 272, 289 (1998) (O'Connor, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). Even assuming that this holding is not part of our "death-is-different" jurisprudence, Shafer v. South Carolina, 532 U. S. 36, 55 (2001) (Scalia, J., dissenting) (citation omitted), respondent here is not complaining about the absence of procedural safeguards; he disagrees with the Attorney General's judgment on a point of law. (2) We have recognized the existence of a due process liberty interest when

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