Presidential pardon (#302, Topic P)

Gerald R. Ford, the 38th president, who died last Tuesday evening in Palm Desert CA (#294), had his body flown in to Washington DC for public viewing the last few days and a national funeral today, beginning with a motorcade at 9:30 am, a memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral at 10:30 (where President George Bush, former president George H. W. Bush, and others eulogized), before flying the body out for burial at the Ford presidential museum in Grand Rapids MI. Federal offices, post offices, and the stock markets were all closed in Ford's honor. Debated over the air the last few days were Ford's achievements, his sincerity, serenity, decency. A major topic receiving a lot of pundits' time seems to be Ford's pardoning his immediate predecessor, Richard M. Nixon; most felt that his so doing was the main reason for Ford's inability to be elected on his own volition in 1976. As a layman but an interested observer of democracy, it seems to me that the administrative pardon is a mockery to democracy. It imparts two messages: (1) that the judicial process is deficient, irrelevant, and/or meaningless, and/or (2) that the power of the executive branch is above that of the judiciary. In Nixon's case, he was never referred to the judiciary -- the pardon, in effect, is pre-emptive. I learned that, to be granted a pardon, the pardonee must admit his/her wrong-doing. In Nixon's case, his chief of staff, General Al Haig, got wind that Nixon would be pardoned regardless, advised his boss not to admit any wrong-doing -- which proved to be so. I vaguely recall that, during Nixon's administration, he pardoned a soldier who committed atrocity in Vietnam -- the case was too well-known, so he had a "trial" to calm the international outcry; the soldier was judged to be guilty, but, after a short period of perfunctory incarceration, he was pardoned -- quietly, to escape the unavoidable international attention. There is now a case similar to that one being tried before a US military court: an American soldier violated a 14-year-old girl in Iraq in her house; with more than a dozen eye-witnesses to this action, he proceeded to keep them all. How would this military court rule? If the soldier is judged to have committed wrong-doing, would the president pardon him? We'll see.