On Tuesday, President Obama commuted the sentences of 209 people, including 109 with life sentences. The move brought Obama’s count to 1,385, the most commutations of any president in American history. He also pardoned 64 people Tuesday. In all, the president has granted these forms of mercy to 1,597 people over the course of his presidency.
Pundits and politicians are already picking apart the list of the forgiven, particularly the commutation of former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning’s 35-year prison sentence for leaking government data to WikiLeaks in 2010. House Speaker Paul Ryan called Manning’s commutation “outrageous”; Sen. Lindsey Graham wrote that it was a “slap in the face.” “The real travesty is the show of leniency for a progressive cause célèbre whose actions put hundreds of lives at risk,” sneered an editorial in the Wall Street Journal.
It’s perfectly reasonable to debate the relative justice of any particular act of clemency. But the larger truth is that presidential acts of clemency are unjust by their very nature. They are gifts of grace to people who do not “deserve” them—people who have been found guilty by the system designed to decide such things. Forgiveness is bestowed on them not because they are discovered to be innocent, but because one powerful person decides to override that system.
In these last few days before the inauguration of a man known for his relentless vindictiveness, it’s worth pausing to appreciate the fundamental beauty of the presidential pardon. News consumers are accustomed to seeing injustice perpetrated in the direction of harshness: false convictions, uneven sentencing, inhumane prison practices, and so on. Pardons and commutations, by contrast, are unjust in the direction of mercy. They are paradoxical in other refreshing ways, too: sudden action from a bureaucracy, random grace from an institution.
Of course, even an impressively long and diverse list of pardons and commutations should not erase a presidential administration’s record on criminal justice issues. Bad policy is a far more pressing issue, as it affects so many more people than just the lucky few who happen to catch the right person’s eye at the right moment in history. And not all pardons are created equal. When clemency accrues disproportionately to pals of the powerful, it loses a fair bit of its moral force.
All of that is true. And yet on Tuesday, 273 Americans received no less than new life. It’s hard not to be moved by that: the gift of freedom, “undeserved” and freely given. Progressives may be uncomfortable framing justice in religious terms, but it would be hard to find a more succinct summary of the radical appeal of a God who is eager to forgive. And as confirmation hearings in Washington this week resurrect tired and terrifying debates about the line between church and state, commutations are a reminder that lessons of faith can inform our politics in quieter ways, too.
In a 2003 speech to the American Bar Association, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy lamented that the number of pardons was dropping. “A people confident in its laws and institutions should not be ashamed of mercy,” Kennedy said, perhaps drawing on his Catholic faith as he petitioned his audience of lawyers to make more such requests to presidents and governors. In making this argument, the judge quoted from a passage in The Merchant of Venice. Today, it reads something like a prayer for the next four years:
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.
