Writer's Block: Pardon You, Mr. Nixon

[howeird]

[Error: unknown template qotd] The pardon should have been nullified by the Supreme Court, it violated the "innocent till proved guilty" clause. Pardons can not be granted in advanced, because there is nothing to pardon an innocent person for.

Nixon should have been prosecuted and tried. It is possible he would have been found innocent because much of the evidence was protected by the 5th amendment. His secretary should also have been tried for her complicity in destroying evidence. I don't believe she was given a pre-pardon, but I know she was never prosecuted.

Comments

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

So he should have been tried because if he had been he could have got off by taking the fifth? Whereas being pardoned made it clear that he had actually done something worth pardoning?

*goes and looks up Fifth Amendment*

Wow, that's interesting. I knew it was a device by which a criminal couldn't be compelled under oath to say "I did it," and I didn't really see the point--if you say "I plead the fifth" rather than "I didn't do it" isn't the implication kind of obvious? I could see the value of it in things like the McCarthy hearings, where the "crime" being prosecuted was not a crime in the normal sense of the word. I hadn't realised that that bit was just one phrase in a whole package of good and necessary provisions (at least one of which we in the UK have now lost).

I also didn't know that it arose from the persecution of Puritans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Especially as I've just recently been told quite categorically in another conversation that they weren't persecuted at all.

But I'm still not sure what you're saying here. If we think Nixon did not in fact do the things for which he was pardoned, then yes, by all means he should have been tried and found innocent. If we think he did, though, and trying him would only have allowed him to get off on a legal technicality, then I don't see what difference it makes. Whether he did or did not do anything wrong, he wasn't materially punished. Whether he did or did not do anything wrong, some people still like him and some people don't. I confidently expect something similar will happen with Bush.