Of course, pardons are misusable. I would support, for example, disallowing presidential pardons in the last year of a presidential term, so that Presidents can't cut and run from the political consequences of their last minute pardons. That could cut down on egregious abuses like Clinton's.

Corrupt by definition because it is always a corruption of "equality before the law"

Keep in mind that many (most?) people consider interrelated checks and balances between the different branches of government to be a good thing. And the system was designed to be biased in favor of false negatives in order to reduce as much as possible the incidents of false positives (wrongful convictions). I consider that a feature, not a bug.

Appeal courts rule on law. You see the difference?

You didn't quite explicitly say this, but it sounds to me like you want to make sure every unjustly convicted person suffers as publicly and viscerally as possible in order to drum up the political will for change. (I can't think of any other principled reason to oppose a mechanism to free the innocent victims of an imperfect system.)

I suppose it's easy to feel that way when it's not you or one of your loved ones in that position. To them, it's not just a "fig leaf". It's getting their life back.

The rule of law and equality before it is a principal I believe in. Some politician being able to arbitrarily decide that the rule of law does not apply to a particular person is a violation of that principal.

Maybe one day you'll see why it matters.

> If you think someone needs a presidential pardon, just back up and think "which law is horrible and unjust and must be reformed." If not the law maybe the courts. Pardon at best is a fig leaf over a gaping wound.

Maybe you don't like to put it this bluntly, but it seems pretty clear that you were saying "pardoning is never justified, just reform the legal system instead." I saw no consideration in any of your statements for the possibility that some of these unfortunate souls could get some relief in the meantime while the long, hard, and uncertain work of reform is carried out. No, that would be "at best a fig leaf", meaning something covers up a dirty secret, alleviating shame and embarrassment.

If you feel I'm misrepresenting your original argument, I'm willing to listen to an alternative explanation of what you meant. But until one is offered, I stand by what I said. It was a reasonable interpretation of your words as you wrote them.

By the way, you keep describing this as the President "being able to arbitrarily decide that the rule of law does not apply to a particular person". This is an effective rhetorical technique because it conjures up images of corrupt witch hunts, political retribution, secret prisons, and other such nightmarish scenarios encountered in totalitarian distopias. You're leaving out the fact that the politician can only decide this in one direction - toward innocence. It can't be used to punish anybody. It can only be used to delight them. I consider this an example of the Noncentral Fallacy[0].

> Maybe one day you'll see why it matters.

Maybe, rather than putting on an air of dismissive superiority and suggesting that I'm just not wise and experienced enough to see the world the way it really is, you could provide an actual example of how it could matter to me in a negative way.

[0] http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_Richard_Nixon

That can affect you in a negative way.

Instinctually, I tend towards preferring legalism, and the formation of institutions rather than cults of personality and the types of ad hoc choices that undermine rational preferences in policy decisions.

However, politics are human with outputs often affecting inputs and any number of chaotic dynamics, such that a controlled corruption of some sort might be useful. Especially if the point of political leaders is to lead while environments are in flux, it makes sense that they'd occasionally find someone guilty of a current law not guilty in the context of where the law should be.

Taking a very large step back, it may have been a historic mistake by the President to pardon the large number of Americans who committed torture and ordered people to be torturers. It was unseemly to even consider the type of punishment people meritted for doing what they claimed was work for their country, and possibly as problemmatic to consider the last VP or even President being imprisoned or an even more severe punishment.

On the one hand that likely would have ushered in cycles of political retribution that were violent and vindictive. On the other, the pardons have allowed people to pretend that torture isn't definitively illegal regardless of any claimed justifications.