미국의 사면 제도에 관한 고찰

Abstract

In case of a special pardon which successive Presidents in the Republic of Korea have acted, they have been insisting ‘the national harmony’ or ‘to revive of the economy’ ‘as an their moral duty. But They are being criticized that it is politically abused and misused. It has socially been a pending issue as well. It is the reason that a constitutional device or a legal basis is weak to restrict or restrain the authority against a president’s legal pardon. The pardon power is a deep rooted institution in American history, and clemency grants were a regular characteristic of the U.S. criminal justice system by the first half of the 20th century. The United States having more than two million people in jail has no peer in the world in the number of inmates. And most of the states spend a colossal amount of dollars each year to keep their corrections systems. In short, national resources are misspent to support prisoners serving long sentences. Recently, a lot of reformation plans have been proposed to reduce the number of prisoners, including reform of system of punishment, efforts of the prevention of crime emphasis upon correction or resocialization of offenders. Especially, the robust clemency system of state level is one of the reform measures to decrease the number of inmates. On the contrary, it is our practice to grant a pardon selectively to the heads of conglomerates who committed the wrong under the cloak of pro-business policies or the people close to the president. That is why Korea should limit the prerequisites of the pardon power by law. In conclusion, it is faced to clean distrust which comes from the excercise of the pardon and to improve a system to meet the original pardon system which the sprit of the Constitution pursuits. As a substitute, the regulations of specific procedures on the pardon must be improved for solving this task.