The Politics of Grace: On the Moral Justification of Executive Clemency

Abstract

† Attorney-Advisor, Office of the Pardon Attorney, United States Department of Justice. J.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1991); M.A., Philosophy and Social Policy, American University (2003). The views expressed in this essay are solely my own opinions and do not reflect the official position of the Justice Department or the Office of the Pardon Attorney. I would like to thank Deirdre Golash, Lucinda Peach, Jeffrey Reiman, and Jason Specht for their many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own. 1. Ex parte Wells, 59 U.S. (18 How.) 307, 310 (1856). 2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition 237 (1958). 3. According to Andrew Brien, “[t]he earliest recorded instance of an institution permitting an authority to forbear from acting against another’s interests appears in the law code of Hammurabi.” Andrew Brien, Mercy Within Legal Justice, 24 Soc. Theory & Prac. 83, 83 n.2 (1998), citing G. R. Driver & J. C. Miles, 1 The Babylonian Laws xxiv-xxv, 281-82, 348-49 (1955); see also 3 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Attorney General’s Survey of Release Procedures: Pardons 1-53 (1939).