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Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Friday that he has directed his federal prosecutors to pursue the most severe penalties possible, including mandatory minimum sentences, in his first step toward a return to the war on drugs of the 1980s and 1990s that resulted in long sentences for many minority defendants and packed U.S. prisons.
[...] In the later years of the Obama administration, a bipartisan consensus emerged on Capitol Hill for sentencing reform legislation, which Sessions opposed and successfully worked to derail.
In a two-page memo to federal prosecutors across the country, Sessions overturned former attorney general Eric H. Holder's sweeping criminal charging policy that instructed his prosecutors to avoid charging certain defendants with offenses that would trigger long mandatory minimum sentences. In its place, Sessions told his more than 5,000 assistant U.S. attorneys to charge defendants with the most serious crimes, carrying the toughest penalties.
More at Washington Post, Fox News, Huffington Post, The Hill
Memorandum on Department Charging and Sentencing Policy - US Department of Justice PDF
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday May 16 2017, @04:33PM
A pardon does not make what you did legal
Correct.
a pardon is an admission it was illegal but they won't prosecute you. That's why some people refuse to accept a pardon, because it's basically admitting they were guilty.
That's actually unclear under U.S. law. The general citation for this is Burdick vs. U.S. [wikipedia.org] (1915), but most legal scholars seem to regard the statement in McKenna's opinion about a pardon implying an "imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it" to be obiter dicta and thus non-binding. The opinion here also didn't explicitly overrule the previous dicta in Ex Parte Garland [wikipedia.org] (1866), which said:
A pardon reaches both the punishment prescribed for the offense and the guilt of the offender; and when the pardon is full, it releases the punishment and blots out the existence of the guilt, so that in the eye of the law the offender is as innocent as if he had never committed the offense... It makes him, as it were, a new man, and gives him a new credit and capacity.
Garland was about Civil War pardons for lawyers who had previously served in the Confederacy. While Burdick's dicta really was just speculation about the rationale for rejecting a pardon, Garland's dicta was more on-point, asserting that a pardoned person was effectively beyond the reach of the law for the offense supposedly committed.
Anyhow, in the century since Burdick, no other definitive rulings have addressed the issue. Courts cite both (and a few other cases); generally the trend seems to come down in favor of the Burdick perspective, but since both are viewed as dicta, some court rulings still hold to the Garland standard. This issue came up recently in discussion over Hillary Clinton, and it was a hot topic a decade ago with Scooter Libby. You can find legal scholars arguing on both sides of the issue when it has come up.