Quote Originally Posted by Timbuk2 View Post
Why.

What is the purpose of it? What possible good did those who instigated the ... tradition? policy? constitutional amendment? ... hope it would bring?

Allowing criminals, who have convictions for a whole spectrum of very serious charges, suddenly to be back in circulation at the whims of a potentially spiteful outgoing president cannot ever be a good thing.

So waddafuq America.
Hmm. So I think it's a little bit of a stretch to call it a holdover from royal prerogatives, nor was it included in the text of the Constitution willy-nilly (it's not an amendment, it's part of the original document describing the powers of the executive). There was clear discussion on the issue - Hamilton famously wrote one of the Federalist Papers defending the role of the executive in providing pardons, though others did predict it could be misused by the President.

If I remember Hamilton's argument correctly, he suggested that investing pardon power in a single individual was a feature and not a bug - groups or committees might err on the side of harshness, but a single individual might better weigh pleas for clemency. Hamilton correctly predicted that no justice system was perfect, and that even if the law was enforced without favor you might still find niche situations where the justice system had failed to deliver justice. The remedy, he argued, was to invest in a single person the power to correct these miscarriages of justice or please for mercy.

Throughout US history the pardon has often been used for purposes that might have been personal, political, or partisan, yes. But it has also been used to grant clemency for many who were indeed let down by our justice system. Back in the 90s and early 2000s there were a wave of governors who decided the failings of the death penalty were so great that they granted blanket commutations of death sentences (and instead reverted to life in prison). This led to the sharp reduction in the use of the death penalty across much of the US. Sometimes the pardon has been used to smooth over foreign relations over espionage charges. Etc.

I think it's a worthwhile question about whether the pardon power should be constitutionally limited beyond the current impeachment limitation. Certainly I can see value in restricting the kind of political shenanigans we have seen with many recent presidents (certainly Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump abused it to one degree or another; I don't remember about Obama). But I think there is certainly a place for this kind of power to exist in our government.