Oh, boy, actually inviting me to pontificate on a subject? You're probably gonna be sorry. Be that as it may, here goes:
First, here are the statistics, in order of the number of pardons granted (those with asterisks are estimates):
Franklin D. Roosevelt 3687 / / Woodrow Wilson 2480
Harry S. Truman 2044 / / Calvin Coolidge 1545
Herbert Hoover 1385 / / Ulysses S. Grant 1332
Lyndon B. Johnson 1187 / / Dwight D. Eisenhower 1157
Grover Cleveland * 1107 / / Theodore Roosevelt * 981
Richard Nixon 926 / / William McKinley * 918
Rutherford B. Hayes 893 / / Warren G. Harding 800
William H. Taft 758 / / Andrew Johnson 654
Benjamin Harrison 613 / / John F. Kennedy 575
Jimmy Carter 566 / / Bill Clinton 456
James Monroe 419 / / Gerald Ford 409
Ronald Reagan 406 / / Andrew Jackson 386
Abraham Lincoln 343 / / Chester Arthur 337
James K. Polk 268 / / John Tyler 209
James Madison 196 / / John Quincy Adams 183
Millard Fillmore 170 / / Martin Van Buren 168
James Buchanan 150 / / Franklin Pierce 142
Thomas Jefferson 119 / / George H.W. Bush 77
Zachary Taylor 38 / / John Adams 21
George Washington 16 / / James Garfield 0 (died before he could pardon)
William H Harrison 0 (died before he could pardon)
As of December, 2005, George W. Bush had granted 66 pardons.
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Some of the most notable pardons over the years:
* Whiskey Rebellion rebels (Washington, 1795; amnesty)
* Confederate rebels (Johnson, 1868; amnesty)
* Samuel Mudd (Johnson, 1869)
* Eugene Debs (Harding, 1921)
* Marcus Garvey (Coolidge, 1927; clemency for mail fraud conviction in 1923)
* Oscar Collazo (Truman, 1952; commuted death sentence to life imprisonment for attempting to assassinate President Truman in 1950)
* Jimmy Hoffa (Nixon, 1971; commutation)
* Richard Nixon (Ford, 1974)
* Tokyo Rose (Ford, 1977)
* Clyde Wilson (Ford, 1977)
* Vietnam draft resisters (Carter, 1977; amnesty)
* G. Gordon Liddy (Carter, 1977; commuted sentence for Watergate break-in in 1972)
* Irving Flores Rodriguez, Lolita Lebron, and Rafael Cancel-Miranda (Carter, 1979; clemency for machine-gunning the U.S. House of Representatives and wounding five Congressmen in 1954)
* Oscar Collazo (Carter, 1979; clemency for attempting to assassinate President Truman in 1950)
* Patricia Hearst (Carter, 1979; commuted sentence for armed robbery)
* Peter Yarrow (Carter, 1981; clemency for a sexual offence in 1969)
* W. Mark Felt and Edward Miller (Reagan, 1981; clemency for authorizing FBI agents to break into Vietnam protestors' offices without warrants)
* Gilbert Dozier (Reagan, 1984; commuted sentence for extortion and racketeering)
* Junior Johnson (Reagan, 1985; pardoned for liquor offences committed in the 1950s)
* Albert Alkek (Reagan, 1987; clemency for withholding information from federal officials regarding an oil price-fixing scheme)
* George Steinbrenner (Reagan, 1989)
* Armand Hammer (Bush, 1989; pardoned for making illegal contributions to President Nixon's re-election campaign in 1972)
* Caspar Weinberger (Bush, 1992)
* Edwin L. Cox, Jr. (Bush, 1993; pardoned for bank fraud)
* Aslam P. Adam (Bush, 1993; clemency for heroin trafficking)
* Joseph Occhipinti (Bush, 1993; commuted sentence for violating the civil rights of accused criminals)
(The emphasis on some of them indicates I thought they were important)
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And, some common questions:
* Can a Presidential pardon be refused?
Yes. An editor was granted a pardon as a form of immunity to force him to name sources. He refused the pardon, and was convicted of contempt. The Supreme Court heard his appeal and rejected the conviction.
* Given the checks-and-balances in American government, why is the pardon power lodged solely with one individual, the President?
At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia the Framers appear to have accepted the argument that the prerogative of mercy, upon which the pardon power is based, is most efficiently and equitably exercised by a single individual, as opposed to a body of legislators or judges. In Federalist No. 74, supporting the ratification of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton wrote:
Humanity and good policy conspire to dictate, that the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed...As the sense of responsibility is always strongest in proportion as it is undivided, it may be inferred that a single man would be most ready to attend to the force of those motives, which might plead for a mitigation of the rigor of the law, and least apt to yield to considerations, which were calculated to shelter a fit object of its vengeance...On the other hand, as men generally derive confidence from their numbers, they might often encourage each other in an act of obduracy and might be less sensible to the apprehension of suspicion or censure for an injudicious or affected clemency. On these accounts, one man appears to be a more eligible dispenser of the mercy of the government than a body of men.
* How many pardons did President Clinton give during his two terms?
In total, President Clinton issued 456 executive clemency orders - 395 pardons and 61 commutations - between 1993 and January 20, 2001. The vast majority were issued in the last three years of his presidency - 176 (140 pardons, 36 commutations) were issued on his last day in office.
* Who did previous Presidents pardon, and how many pardons did they issue?
Given the unlimited range of discretion provided in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, previous Presidents have pardoned reprobates, political allies, wrongly-convicted persons, friends, contributors and outright rebels. For individual pardons by particular Presidents, see Notable Pardons. Of the all-but-two Presidents who granted pardons between 1789 and 2001 (Presidents William Henry Harrison and James Garfield did not live to do so), Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued the most clemency orders (3687), while George Washington issued the fewest (16). Click for a full statistical breakdown.
* Is President George W. Bush likely to issue many pardons during his term?
No. For one thing, his father issued very few (77) when he was in office. For another, during his prior term as Governor of Texas, George W. issued fewer pardons than any Texas Governor since the 1940s (16 up to January 2000, as opposed to 70 for his immediate predecessor Ann Richards, 822 for 2-term governor Bill Clements, and 1048 for John Connally, Texas governor from 1963-69).
In a January 2000 interview with reporter Jay Root of the Austin Star-Telegram, Governor Bush explained that his low number of pardons "comes not from political calculation but from pardoning Steven Raney in 1995 for a 1988 marijuana conviction. A few months after being absolved of his crime, the unpaid Ellis County constable was caught stealing cocaine from a drug bust. 'That caused a complete review of the process,' Bush said. 'I have nothing against pardoning. I just haven't been very aggressive on it. There's no philosophical reason. It's just that it kind of slowed us down initially. I said, `Whoa!' because it was a pretty rough story." If anything, the Clinton pardon controversy will make President Bush even more cautious.
* Once a Presidential pardon has been granted, does the petitioner still have a record, or is the record of the offense destroyed?
Generally speaking, a pardon does not mandate expungement of the record. In United States v. Noonan (Third Circuit, 1990), the recipient of a presidential pardon requested a court order expunging all court records relating to his conviction. The Court ruled that while expungment might be in order when an arrest or conviction was constitutionally infirm, there was no precedent for expungement being granted on the basis of a pardon following an unchallenged or otherwise valid conviction: a pardon did not 'blot out guilt' or restore the offender to a state of innocence in the eye of the law.
* Can a Presidential pardon be reversed?
No. Under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution there are no grounds for reversal provided, and no authority identified that could accomplish a legal reversal (although Congress might theoretically pass a resolution condemning a Presidential clemency order, as was done for the first time in the wake of President Clinton's 1999 commutation of the sentences of 16 FALN Puerto Rican nationalists). Early in the 2001 pardons controversy, certain lawyers in the Bush administration suggested that, under a line of 19th century cases, signed pardons, like warrants, might require delivery to be valid, but this argument was not officially pursued in the wake of President George W. Bush's subsequent statement that he would allow President Clinton's pardons to stand.
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