Steve Palmer [00:00:00]:

All right, Steve Palmer, lawyer talk, Q and A style. What's that mean? Question and answer. If you've got a question, you want me to answer it, I'm going to do it right here. You can send it to lawyertalkpodcast.com or leave it in the comments. This is really a conglomerate of several questions I've had and some discussions I've had about the presidential pardon power. Now, believe it or not, this is not something I knew off the top of my head. I did a little bit of research. I knew the basics, but I wanted to sort of address what's going on because we've heard of president, former President Biden's pardons.

Steve Palmer [00:00:31]:

It goes way back. There's questions about Clinton's pardons, Obama's pardons, and now Trump's pardons. And I wanted to talk a little bit about what the pardon power is and what it isn't. First of all, the big distinction. The United States president cannot pardon anyone for state court convictions. So if you think that somebody who is convicted in a state court, say New York, Ohio somewhere, just pick a state. Neither Trump nor any, any president before or after is going to be able to pardon somebody for a state court conviction, only federal convictions. The source of the pardon power is in the executive branch of government outlined in Article 2, Section 2, Clause 1, where it says he shall have the power to grant reprieves and pardons, he being the president, reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States and except in cases of impeachment, means what it says.

Steve Palmer [00:01:30]:

So convictions against the United States, the president can pardon you for them. And I guess pardon means an absolution of the conviction. You can treat it like you weren't convicted. It does not, however, mean that it's going to be wiped from your record, like you would think, an expungement. So if you know some of these famous folks who have been pardoned, I guess the records are still there, but all the, what I'll call the remnants of it or the consequences of the conviction are gone. In other words, your rights are restored. If you lost your firearms rights or your voting rights or whatever it would be, those rights, in theory, are restored by the presidential pardon power. Now, how far can the president go? I think President Biden sort of pushed this as far as anybody I've ever heard of.

Steve Palmer [00:02:15]:

He was pardoning people for crimes that were not even yet discovered. And I don't know that. That. I don't know if that's ever been tested. There's a few cases Going way back to 1885, there was something called the Laura, where the court basically said that the President could pardon people for all sorts of things, including fines. There's another case 40 years later called Ex Parte Grossman. The President may pardon criminal, but not civil contempts. Basically, the court has said, in summary of all the cases, at least that I've read, the President can pardon you for almost anything.

Steve Palmer [00:02:53]:

I've not read anything that specifically says the President can pardon somebody for crimes that nobody knows about yet or maybe discovered in the future. And we may get some litigation on this in years to come because of Biden's pardons into the future or prospective pardons. But what's the takeaway from this? The President can pardon people for just about anything and as long as it's a United States case and there's not a whole lot anybody can do anything about. This goes way back. And I think the history would be in common law where the king would have that kind of power to go around and fix justice around the kingdom. And now it's a relic, and our Constitution has incorporated it. Look, like it or not, it exists. Article 2 of section 2, clause 1.

Steve Palmer [00:03:39]:

Read it, know it, love it. It has everything you need to know about pardons written right there in the Constitution. If you've got a question you want us to cover, lawyer talk off the record, on the air until now.