The quality of mercy is tough to measure, but the quantity of mercy has not been strained in Washington recently. It has been dropping like torrential rain from the heavens. Outgoing President Joe Biden pardoned his son, then commuted the sentences of thousands of individuals who have served more time for nonviolent drug offenses than would be warranted under current guidelines, and then—right as his lease on the White House was up—preemptively pardoned his relatives and political allies for crimes of which they had not yet even been (officially) accused.
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Not to be outdone, incoming President Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 rioters who had definitely been accused and convicted of crimes, including bringing guns to the Capitol to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, a disruption which led to the death of at least one police officer and the injury of approximately 140 more. And then he pardoned Ross Ulbricht, convicted in 2015 of founding and running the online trading marketplace Silk Road, which facilitated trade in illegal drugs and money laundering.
All told, the last two months has seen a reduction in punishment for more than 5,500 people by Presidents. Forgiveness is good. Mercy is noble. So why does this recent Pardonapalooza feel so dirty?
Part of it is, of course, that most of these acts are naked politicking. Intelligent people can disagree on whether Ulbricht really deserved two full life sentences plus 40 years for running a website on which illegal transactions were made. But in announcing the news, President Trump noted that he had offered the pardon in honor of Ulbricht’s mother “and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly.” Trump, the first U.S. president convicted of a felony, went on to insult the “scum” who convicted Ulbricht in 2015 as the same people who came after him. The act seemed to be as much about score-settling as justice.
Politically motivated pardons are nothing new. But the type and scale of these pardons feel unprecedented. How can Biden pardon people from future prosecution? What does that mean? Is that stretching the power of the pardon too far? How could Trump pardon more than 1,500 people on his first day in office, rather than upon departure? It seemed hasty. Were none of those people guilty as charged, even though there’s footage of them attacking police officers and one of them has already been rearrested on federal gun charges?
The most unsettling part of these pardons, however, is that they are giving mercy a bad name.
The purpose of the pardon is to allow for a fudge when the legal system has misfired or overshot the mark. “A pardon is an instance of mercy, of not giving the person the full extent of justice, but giving them less than society has said that they deserve,” says Everett Worthington, a psychologist and professor who has written five books on forgiveness. If a person has committed a crime, but the punishment has been too severe, or they have turned their lives around, or the situation is clearly unfair, a supreme authority can wave a magic wand and balance out the scales of justice a bit.
Since pardoning is not unlike an act of God—absolving folks for something they did to others—very few people have the authority to do it. And when they twist the power to do good by settling political scores or building a bulwark against potential attack, it not only makes people lose (more) faith in government, but in the benefits of forgiveness. “It is violating a way that we would like to see pardons thought about,” says Worthington, “which is as an act of generosity, an act of kindness, an act of mercy.”
There’s a growing body of research about forgiveness, which suggests—as if this needed proving—that it’s an important part of all human gathering and interaction. It allows people, when they do wrong, to not have to be pariahs forever. It allows the aggrieved to be released from the life-sucking need for revenge. But usually there are preconditions for gaining forgiveness: admitting guilt, expressing remorse, making amends. It flies in the face of our instinct for justice that people can be let off the hook when none of these have been offered. It makes it harder to forgive them.
We can already see the tide turning against mercy. During a sermon at the Washington Cathedral on Inauguration day, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde asked President Trump “to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” specifically mentioning the children of undocumented immigrants and those who are LGBTQ. For this, she was publicly excoriated, by the president and his supporters.
“There’s something sacred and noble about forgiving and mercy,” says Brandon Warmke, an associate professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University and co-editor of the book Forgiveness and Its Moral Dimensions. “And the problem is so many of these acts that are in the cognate family of forgiveness or mercy are now purely political or transactional.”
It wasn’t always this way. Pardons can promote unity. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter, “in the interest of fairness,” commuted the sentence of a person with politics opposite to his, G. Gordon Liddy, who had been sentenced to much more time than the other Watergate conspirators. Robert Enright, a professor at the University of Madison Wisconsin, who organized the first National Conference on Forgiveness and has done work in countries such as Rwanda and South Africa that are recovering from deep civil strife, says that pardons are in fact most powerful when offered to an erstwhile enemy, to promote peace. “But it wasn’t as if President Trump is forgiving Democrats who are on Biden’s side,” says Enright. “And it’s not that Biden is legally pardoning those who are Trump’s relatives.”
Granted, pardons are not even in the top 20 ways a U.S. president can wield power. And arguably, they don’t directly hurt anyone, at least at first. When pardons are given easily, or bizarrely, or en masse, or to own the libs or the MAGA, rather than to rebalance the scales of justice, it warps them, further infuriates the nation, and makes empathy even more unlikely. In that climate, acts of compassion and humanity become suspicious, even unwelcome. It’s just another cinderblock in the wall of mistrust that is being assembled across America.
The clearest act of nobility among the crop of pardons that have been handed out came not from a leader but a 71-year-old retired drug and alcohol counselor from Boise, Idaho. Pamela Hemphill, who spent two months in prison for entering the Capitol on Jan. 6, asked her lawyer to reject her pardon, because she was guilty, and because it was an insult to the police officers who helped her after the day turned violent. “The pardon is a slap in their face,” Hemphill told the Idaho Statesman. “It’s like the country let them down.”
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