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Help me understand why presidential pardons exist?
because the world can’t be sorted into neat little boxes, and the law isn’t perfect. there are many things that are technically crimes that would be a moral imperative to ignore (eg whistleblowing, draft dodging for the vietnam war)
the law should be tempered. the system the US provides for that is police discretion, prosecutorial discretion, and pardon
perhaps the system should be different, but a mechanism to pardon people for crimes where society has moved on (selling weed, for example), or where a moral imperative to break the law exists (again, something like whistleblowers: chelsea manning was pardoned… or rather her sentence was commuted, which i believe is different but similar logical reasoning) is very important imo
you can’t simultaneously and logically hold these 2 things:
More or less the same reason jury nullification exists, just concentrated on executive leadership. The problem isn't that it exists, the problem is the bribery and ethical issues. Theoretically, if the executive is abusing the power, the legislature is supposed to remove them, but since we no longer operate in a system where that will happen... Here we are.
Jury nullification doesn't exist by intentional design.
Its simply a function of not being able to prosecute jurors for their decisions.
I guess its similar to pardons in that the system is based on the assumption that no one would abuse these caveats.