Federal Executive Clemency in United States,
1789-1995:
A Preliminary Report
P.S. Ruckman, Jr.
PSRuckman@aol.com
Abstract :
This paper provides a preliminary report of a comprehensive data set on federal executive clemency under construction by the author. Individual data for the period 1789-1893 have been collected by the author from National Archives Microfilm set T967. These data were combined with data compiled in the Annual Reports of the Attorney General (1909-1933). Finally, aggregate data from 1934 to 1995 were provided by the Office of the Pardon Attorney, U.S. Department of Department of Justice. The complete set consists of over 27,000 acts of clemency from George Washington to Bill Clinton. This study thus constitutes the first attempt at mapping the course of clemency policy throughout our nation's history. In the course of presenting the individual data, attention is given to three factors which have been hypothesized to influence clemency policy: presidential character, administrative adjustment, and seasonal clemency.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1995 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, Tampa, FL, November 1-4, 1995.
Introduction>\
In a recent review of the literature on federal executive clemency, Ruckman notes the majority of extant literature appears in the law review or editorial format (forthcoming). Examinations of clemency powers typically trace their interesting origins and early development, their transformation in common law, their brief consideration at the constitutional convention and subsequent developments in classic Supreme Court decisions. Other scholars have specifically focused on the exercise of executive clemency in particular areas of law (such as the death penalty) or address more political concerns in highly publicized, controversial cases. Current examinations rarely involve the analysis, or even presentation of data (forthcoming).
In fact, P.S. Ruckman Jr.'s review of the literature uncovered a mere four articles in social science journals. Each of the articles appears in Presidential Studies Quarterly (Pederson 1977, Orman and Rudoni 1979, Rozell 1994, Shichor and Ranish 1980) and only one involves the presentation and systematic analysis of data (Pederson 1977). As Pederson's 1977 discussion focuses on the relatively rare exercise of amnesty (see discussion below), it appears that Humbert's 1941 The Pardoning Power of the Presidency stands as the lone attempt at a systematic overview of federal clemency policy. In general, one might continue to agree with the conclusion of a 1939 report by the U.S. Attorney General:
There has never been an adequate treatment of the subject of
pardon. [It] has been a neglected orphan, allowed to grow
without benefit of careful grooming which has been accorded
other branches of law (Survey, vii, ix).
The lack of systematic analysis of the clemency power is somewhat surprising for several reasons. First, the power granted in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution has been directly related to - if not the critical feature of - some of the most salient political events in our nation's history including: the Whiskey Rebellion, Fries Rebellion, the Alien- Sedition Acts, the presidential election of 1800, the Aaron Burr conspiracy trial, the War Between the States, Reconstruction, the post-Vietnam war era, the resignation of Richard Nixon and the 1976 presidential campaign, and the so-called 'Iran-Contra' Affair. Second, our nation's history is also checkered with clemency actions which have attracted a significant amount of public discussion (Jefferson Davis, Eugene Debs, Iva Togura, Patricia Hearst, James Hoffa, George Steinbrenner III, Armand Hammer, Peter Yarrow, G. Gordon Liddy - to name a few). Third, the utilization of clemency powers has played a major role in the development of criminal law's recognition of an insanity defense, self-defense, and compulsion. Clemency powers have also played a major role in the movement to institutionalize separate treatment of juvenile offenders. Fourth, the clemency decisions of presidents have been the focus of numerous and, in some instances, classic decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. Our nation's last seventeen presidents have averaged over two hundred acts of clemency per year (Ruckman 1994b), yet federal executive clemency has been virtually immune to the analytic lenses of political scientists.
In this paper, I provide a "preliminary" report of federal executive clemency from 1789 to 1995. The discussion, however, will primarily emphasize the individual warrants which presidents issued during the period 1789 to 1933. The discussion will focus on the early portion of the data for three reasons:
1) aggregate data for clemency after 1933 have been discussed previously by the author (Ruckman 1994b, 1995, forthcoming).
2) the individual data from 1789 to 1893 are the product of original research by the author and the results of this massive data collection effort are presented here for the first time.
3) the combination of the author's data (1789 to 1893) with individual data also gathered by the author from the Annual Reports of the Attorney General (1907 to 1933) allows for analysis of a broad period of clemency policy, most of which has been hitherto ignored.
Data Collection
In order to engage in systematic analysis of federal executive clemency policy, the author has collected data (individual and aggregate) from a variety of sources. This paper represents the sixth paper which the author has written as a result of this effort. Two of the first five efforts have been accepted for publication. The remaining papers are currently under review.
Individual data for the period 1789-1893 were collected from National Archives Microfilm Set T967, "Pardons and Remissions." T967 consists of six microfilm rolls of the handwritten clemency warrants issued by presidents from George Washington to Grover Cleveland (first term). Each warrant was examined and code sheets were created noting the date the warrant was issued, the year of the president's term, the name of the recipient(s), the state from which the case originated, the violation(s) involved, and the type of clemency that was extended (pardon, conditional pardon, remission, respite, commutation of sentence, etc.). As the set is in somewhat poor condition and the handwriting is not always clear, the initial round of coding took almost two years to complete. The National Archive's Textual Reference Branch has recently extended an invitation to the author to provide a "descriptive pamphlet" for the set. This would seem to further indicate no one has previously examined (much less organized) the set in this manner.
The author attempted to gather further individual data for the period 1894-1933 through the Annual Reports of the Attorney General. The Reports are printed by the U.S. Government printing office and are hard bound. Once again, each act was examined and coding sheets indicate the date of the warrant, the year of the president's term, the name of the recipient(s), the state from which the case originated, the violation(s) involved, and the type of clemency that was extended (pardon, conditional pardon, remission, respite, commutation of sentence, etc.). While collection of data from the Attorney General's Annual Reports was significantly less burdensome than working from the handwritten warrants, complete data were not available for Cleveland's second term, McKinley's terms and most of Theodore Roosevelt's first term. As a result, this report will utilize estimates obtained from Humbert (1941) for these periods where appropriate (see discussion below).
The Annual Reports of the Attorney General discontinued the reporting of individual warrants after 1933. Reports after 1934 do however contain aggregate statistics of clemency policy. As the Office of the Pardon Attorney in Washington, D.C. has bound copies of individual warrants issued from 1934-1995, the author does hope to conduct further data collection on individual warrants. The Office has been generous in providing the author with aggregate data on clemency from 1934-1995, separated by administration and fiscal year units.
As the author has already provided a separate discussions of the data from the period 1900-1993 (Ruckman 1995, forthcoming) and conducted a multivariate statistical analysis of the data from 1934 to 1994, this paper will focus primarily on the individual data from 1789 to 1933. So far as can be determined, the data from 1789 to 1893 are "original" in the sense that the author knows of no other summarization of the clemency policy of that period (at the individual or aggregate level). After discussion of the data from 1789 to 1933, a brief overview of the data from 1789 to 1995 will be provided.
Expectations or "Hypotheses" of Interest
As noted, the author has already provided a separate discussions of aggregate data from the period 1934-1993. Thus, this paper will focus primarily on the individual data which were available for the period 1789 to 1933. Given the current dearth of systematic examination of clemency policy, the data were approached with little in the way of expectations. The presentation will however utilize the findings of Pederson (1977) Humbert (1941) and the author's previous research (Ruckman 1994a, 1994b, 1995, forthcoming, Ruckman and Kincaid 1995) for purposes of organization.
Presidential "Character"
In an interesting 1977 study, William D. Pederson examines the relationship between psychological profiles of thirty-three presidents of the United States and executive clemency activity. Pederson places each of our nation's first thirty-three presidents in the four categories of character types explicated in James David Barber's now classic work, The Presidential Character. Predicting Performance in the White House (4th edition, 1992). As Barber's categorization scheme formally begins with the administration of William Howard Taft, Pederson's categorization process is necessarily supplemented by social psychological scaling methods employed in Gary M. Maranell's questionnaire study of nearly six hundred American historians ("The Evaluation of Presidents: An Expansion of the Schlesinger Polls," Journal of American History, 57: 104-13).
Maranell employs dimensions of "activeness" and "flexibility" and Pederson juxtaposes Maranell's rankings to create a new fourfold typology. Noting "strong agreement" between the categorization schemes of Barber, the rankings of Maranell, and rankings in a study by Erwin C. Hargrove (Presidential Leadership. Personality and Political Style, 1966), Pederson presents data comparing each "presidential type" with the "amnesty record" (Table 2, 179).
Pederson concludes amnesty is an American tradition that "depends on presidential character" (179). Pederson reports active presidents (both positive and negative) granted 90 percent of the amnesties and active-positive presidents granted a higher percentage of the population of amnesties (55 percent) than presidents in remaining categories (179). Expanding the analysis, Pederson also concludes active-positive presidents "seem to show more willingness to use their clemency power in broader ways" (180). Pederson, finally, submits "an additional effort" was made to "supplement" the formal record by "exploring less public presidential behavior toward the power of executive clemency" (177-9). While Pederson does not fully explain this effort, he reports that, "as far as can be determined," both the formal and informal behavior of presidents toward amnesty "seems consistent with each other" (179).
Ruckman (1995) provides a 'reexamination' of the relationship between presidential character and executive clemency. Examining 19,899 clemency actions from 1900-1993, Ruckman concludes there is further evidence clemency policy is based on presidential character. Active presidents, alone, accounted for 73 percent of the population of 'positive' clemency actions (including 76 percent of the pardons, 65 percent of the commutations and 78 percent of the remissions).
The skew in the proportions of 'positive' actions was, furthermore, not simply an artifact of a higher number of presidents in the active category. The eleven active presidents averaged 1,321 'positive' clemency actions while the six passive presidents averaged 894 'positive' clemency actions. Active-positive presidents had the highest average 'positive' clemency rate (32 percent) while passive-negatives had the lowest average 'positive' clemency rate (24 percent). The three highest 'positive' clemency rates appear among active presidents and six of the eight highest rates appear among such presidents.
The completion of the data collection of pardons and remissions from 1789 to 1893 and its combination with data in the Annual Reports of the Attorney General allow us to, once again, examine the relationship between presidential character and federal executive clemency for all presidents. The categorizations of Barber (1992) will be utilized for presidents from Taft to Bush. Earlier presidents will be categorized based on Pederson's work (1977).
Administrative Adjustment
Humbert (1941) notes "the periodic shifting of administrative personnel also contributes to the increases and decreases in the use of the pardoning power" (1941, 123). Thus, when seeking to understand trends in the exercise of clemency, it may be important to recognize the necessity of an 'adjustment period' for incoming administration. 'Positive' clemency action, furthermore, presupposes familiarity with both the process and individual cases (Ruckman 1994b, forthcoming). Indeed, there is little reason to believe administrations take office with clemency policy as a top priority. Studies of clemency activity in the administrations of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison (Ruckman 1994a) and Lincoln (Ruckman and Kincaid 1995) note steady increases in clemency activity as the term progress.
Figure 1 displays the total number of clemency actions (pardons, commutations of sentence, and remissions) issued by Presidents from Roosevelt to Carter. The first fiscal year unit covered by each administration represents the lowest amount of clemency in every
Figure 1 - about here
administration in Figure 1 with the exception of the Ford administration. Ford, of course, completed Nixon's second term so there was no 'turnover' in the sense of a new administration entering office. In most instances, the figures for the first and second fiscal year units are lower than subsequent years. The Roosevelt and Eisenhower administrations even appear to be characterized by 'adjustment' patterns between terms.
Variation in the number of clemency actions taken by an administration may, of course, be a mere function of the number of requests received during the fiscal year unit or the length of the fiscal year unit covered by the administration. For this reason, Figure 2 views clemency activity from a different perspective. Here, the data indicate the percentage of the total requests which resulted in a grant of some form of clemency for each fiscal year unit. With the exception of the Johnson administration, there is a clear upward trend in the percentage of 'positive' clemency actions as each of the seven administrations progress. The administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Ford, and Carter are particularly transformed by taking this perspective.
Figure 2 - about here
While Figures 1 and 2 are not utterly compelling, they do provide some evidence of an 'adjustment' period for the Office of the Pardon Attorney and incoming Justice Department Officials. In a study of clemency from 1900 to 1993, Ruckman notes the average 'positive' clemency rate for administrations in their first fiscal year unit is 22 percent. In their second and third fiscal year units, administrations have average 'positive' clemency rates of 24 percent and 29 percent respectively. The average for the last fiscal year unit of each of the seventeen administrations (regardless of length of tenure) is 33 percent (forthcoming). A multivariate analysis of 'positive' clemency rates from 1934-1994 conducted by the author finds one a unit increase in the fiscal year is associated with a 3 percent increase in the 'positive' clemency rate (significant at .001). Below, aggregate data from 1789 to 1893 will be examined for similar trends.
"Seasonal" Clemency
Numerous authors have suggested Presidents may have exercised clemency out of a humanistic sentiment for the holiday season. The Christmas season in particular has been singled out as a time when Presidents have exercised clemency in a manner which they may not have otherwise. Kathleen Dean Moore's Pardons: Justice, Mercy, and the Public Interest (1989) speaks of "unjust" pardons which are delivered in order to "celebrate" Christmas or Easter (201, 213). Presidents have certainly engaged in salient acts of clemency during the Christmas season. Such acts may have contributed to the general impression that Presidents are more lenient this time of the year. Warren Harding, for example, moved up the effective date of the commutation of sentence for socialist Eugene Debs because Harding wanted Debs "to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife" (Kobil 1991). James Hoffa's clemency application (filed only on the 17th of December) was also granted in time for Hoffa to be home Christmas Eve 1971. George Bush's decision to pardon former Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and five other former Reagan administration officials on Christmas Eve 1992 attracted some public attention. The examination of the individual data below will, however, allow for a more rigorous examination of the seasonal clemency hypothesis.
Data Overview and Analysis
Table 1 presents data on clemency activity and presidential character. For purposes of space, the 1789-1933 portion of the data is combined with data from 1934-1993 (Ruckman 1994b). Barber's categorizations are used for presidents from Taft to Bush. Presidents before Taft are categorized on the basis of Maranell's work (see discussion above). Data for the administrations of Cleveland, McKinley and T. Roosevelt are, again, estimates based on Humbert (1941). W.H. Harrison and Garfield are excluded from the data as each served less than a year in office.
Given the uncontrolled nature of Table 1 and various inconsistencies in the data, the evidence of a relationship between presidential character and executive clemency seems moderate at best. The twenty-one active presidents do account for 64 percent of the
Table 1 - about here
population of clemency actions, and they have an average of 827 acts of clemency per administration. The seventeen passive presidents average only 596 acts. The positive - negative component of the categorization displays more mixed results. Positive presidents account for 59 percent of the population of clemency actions, but negative presidents have a higher average (824) than positive presidents (665). The matrix is clearly confounded by the fact that ten active - negative presidents have the highest average number of clemency actions (859) for Barber's four classifications of character.
Pederson (1977) and Ruckman (1995) also explore the possibility that active and positive presidents are more willing to utilize varying forms of clemency (pardons, remission, commutations, amnesties, etc.) than are other types of presidents. At this point, we are simply unable to investigate this particular question for presidents before 1900. The author may continue to pursue this path of analysis in the future, but remains convinced there is a serious need for a more rigorous test of character hypothesis. More specifically, the character hypothesis should be tested in a multivariate context.
Administrative Adjustment
Table 2 presents the number of clemency actions taken by each administration from 1789 to 1933 per year of the administration. A "year" is defined here as the period extending from March 4 to March 3 of the following year. Data from 1789 to 1893 were collected by the author from the National Archives Microfilm Set T967. Data from 1909 to 1933 were
Table 2 - about here
collected from the Annual Reports of the Attorney General. In order to at least have an estimate of clemency activity from 1893 to 1909, Humbert's figures have been utilized (1941, 96-7). Humbert's figures are accurately described as 'estimates' in this context as he arranged the data in his study by calendar year (95, note 4).
Excluding Washington's first term (in which no warrants were issued), 21 of the 36 terms (or 58 percent) in Table 2 feature the highest amount of clemency activity in the last year of the term. An additional 7 terms show clemency activity at its height in the third year of the term. At the other extreme, the data show only three terms in which the first
Year of Term Highest Amount of Activity Cumulative Percent
--------------- ------------------------------ -------------------------
4 21 terms 58 percent
3 7 terms 78 percent
2 5 terms 92 percent
1 3 terms 100 percent
year features the highest amount of clemency activity. Unfortunately, two of these three instances occur in the section of the data where Humbert's 1941 estimates were employed. The data in Table 2 provide additional strong evidence clemency policy is affected by periods of adjustment in which administrations become familiar both with individual cases and the overall process. Such trends have, again, been noted in an analyses of clemency from 1900 to 1993 (Ruckman 1994b, forthcoming) and in studies of individual administrations (Ruckman 1994a; Ruckman and Kincaid 1995).
"Seasonal" Clemency
In order to explore the possibility of seasonal patterns in clemency policy, I examined the individual data from 1789 to 1933 and separated activity by month in those years for which the data are complete. "Year" is once again defined as the period starting March 4 and ending March 3 the following year. Table 3 also separates the period in March (the 1st day of the month through the 3rd) right before administrations leave office. In sum, monthly data are presented for a total of one hundred and twenty-nine years: March 1789 to March 1893 and March 1907 to February 1933.
Admittedly, the author generally agrees with Humbert's observation that it is "impossible to tell how many [acts of clemency] would not have been acceptable at other period of the year" (133). Humbert does submit, however, that clemency "seems to increase" around the Christmas season (133) without presenting data on the topic. The evidence for the "seasonal clemency" hypothesis in Table 3 appears to be somewhat mixed.
Table 3 - about here
Of the 15,903 warrants issued, 1,418 (9 percent) were issued in the month of December. Only March and June are all associated with a higher number of warrants. If March warrants issued in the last days of exiting administrations (181) are combined with the remaining warrants issued in March, March emerges as the "clemency month" (1,588 warrants, 10 percent of the population).
The warrants issued by exiting administrations in the first days of March are a point of interest. There are twenty-three instances of this scenario in the one hundred and forty- two years covered by the data. The average number of clemency warrants issued in this brief period (7.87) is actually higher than the averages for four entire months (May, August, September, and November). A tradition of 'last minute' clemency may have been legitimized by George Washington who, on his last day in office, granted clemency to almost as many people as he had the previous eight years as president (Ruckman 1994a). No president issued more than seven warrants in this brief period until the last days of the administration of Andrew Johnson. Johnson issued fourteen warrants in March before leaving office. In some instances, the number of warrants issued in the last three days of office exceeds the monthly average for the administration.
Average Monthly
President Warrants through Term 'Late' Clemency Actions
------------ --------------------------- -------------------------------
Coolidge 23 29
Grant 14 27
Wilson 26 25
Hayes 17 20
Johnson 14 14
A second search for seasonal clemency considered the number of instances in which the clemency activity in a given month represented the largest amount for any month in that year. In the case of a tie, each month was credited as having the highest number of warrants for that year. From this perspective, December activity was the highest of any month in only 6 of the 129 years covered by the data. Ten other months were characterized by the highest amount of clemency activity in more instances. February, for example, contained the most clemency activity in 17 different years. March was the leading month in 19 instances. By this measure, June stands out as the "clemency month" having been characterized by the highest amount of clemency activity in 23 separate years.
Finally, evidence of seasonal clemency might also be detected by an examination of the trend in clemency activity within each year. In particular, we might consider whether the number of clemency actions for the month of December are higher than those of previous months within the year. A closer look at the trends within each year revealed December warrants represented an increase in activity from the previous month in 30 instances (21 percent). December warrants represented an increase in activity from the previous two months in 12 instances (8 percent). December warrants represented an increase from the previous three months in 8 instances (6 percent) and the previous four months in 12 instances (8 percent). In 7 instances, the number of warrants issued in December was higher than the number issued in any of the previous five months (5 percent). Finally, in 16 instances (11 percent), December activity was higher than activity in six or more of the previous months. In sum, December warrants represent an increase from previous months in 60 percent of the years covered by the date. If we remove six years in which there were no clemency warrants issued, December increases are a feature of 63 percent of the years in the analysis.
Executive Clemency 1789 to 1995: A Snapshot
The author's completion of the collection of data from 1789 to 1893 allows us, for the first time, to view federal executive clemency policy over the course of our nation's history. In Figure 3, summary data are presented for administrations from George Washington to William Jefferson Clinton. Once again, the reader is reminded the data presented in Figure 3 are 'soft' in that Cleveland's second term and the terms of McKinley and T. Roosevelt are based on 'estimates' from Humbert (1941).
Franklin Roosevelt's 3,687 grants of clemency represent the largest number of clemency actions taken by a president in our nation's history. Franklin, of course, served multiple terms as president. Herbert Hoover's 1,385 grants of clemency appear to be the highest number for any single term president. Figure 3 indicates clemency activity increased significantly in the terms of Monroe, Lincoln, Grant, and Wilson.
Remarkably, the seventy-seven grants of clemency issued by the Bush administration represent the lowest level of clemency activity in a complete term since the administration of John Adams (1797-1801). The latest data shared with the author by the Office of the Pardon Attorney indicates the Clinton administration has covered portions of three fiscal year units (up through the end of January of 1995). The eight hundred and eight requests for clemency received by the Office in fiscal year 1994 represent the highest number of requests since 1967. Clinton, however, appears to be utilizing the clemency power at a rate similar to that of Bush. The data supplied by the Pardon Attorney indicate Clinton has granted only forty-one pardons and one commutation of sentence.
Is federal executive clemency quickly becoming an aspect of the presidency relegated to past presidents and previous periods of history ? We are currently unable to disaggregate the data by term for the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan due to the fact that the Office of the Pardon Attorney has arranged the data for those administrations by fiscal year. Disaggregation of the data would, however, certainly make even more evident the continuous decline in the exercise of federal executive clemency in the last forty years. A primary future goal of the author will be to disaggregate the data for those presidents who have served more than one term and explore the cause(s) of the obvious decline at the bottom of Figure 3.
The author is immediately struck by two possible explanations for the downward trend in Figure 3. The "law and order" presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon may have increased the salience of criminal justice issues in executive politics to the point that we should no longer expect to find aggressive clemency activity in the executive branch (whether controlled by a Democrat or Republican, a "conservative" or "liberal"). A second possible explanation for the apparent decline in the exercise of clemency is the presence of presidents who had previous experience as a state governor. Ronald Reagan, James Carter and William Jefferson Clinton all served as governors before entering the presidency. Former governors, of course, know - better than anyone - the potential perils of an act of clemency. It may therefore be necessary to reexamine the data upon election of an individual without such experience before reaching more global conclusions about federal executive clemency.
Summary and Future Research
As noted, the author intends to create a comprehensive data set of federal executive clemency, 1789-1995. This paper presents an overview of individual data collected by the author covering the period 1789 to 1893. The individual data provide only moderate support for the proposition that executive clemency is related to presidential character (as operationalized by Maranell and Pederson). The data provide more convincing evidence that clemency policy is affected by changes in the administration. Administrations generally issue more clemency warrants as the term progresses. Finally, the data offer mixed evidence that clemency policy is seasonal. When viewed from the perspective of the total number of warrants issued in each month or the number of times a month had the highest number of warrants for any given year, the evidence does not support the proposition that December is 'clemency month' (due to the Christmas season). When viewed from the perspective of trends within each year, however, there is moderate support that clemency policy increases as one approaches December.
Prior to this study, aggregate data were not available for the period 1789-1893. Aggregate data have been available for period 1894 to 1995. Complications arise, however, with respect to the units which have been employed by researchers. Humbert (1941) and the Office of the Pardon Attorney have arranged data by fiscal year unit in this period. The author can imagine no theoretical reason for the employment of this unit of analysis. It suffers the further disadvantage of misleading researchers as more than one president can serve in the fiscal year unit. The author thus feels a more appropriate unit of measure is the year of the president's term. In order to arrange the data by the year of the president's term, it will be necessary to collect individual data for the entire period.
The author has completed collection of individual level data from 1789 to 1893. Additional individual level data were gathered from the Annual Reports of the Attorney General for the period 1907 to 1933. After bridging the gap between these two collections, the author intends to seek the permission of the Office of the Pardon Attorney to collect individual data from 1934 to 1995. The author intends to share the final result of this effort with the Office of the Pardon Attorney and other individuals interested in researching federal executive clemency policy.
References
Humbert, W. H. 1941. The Pardoning Power. Washington, D.C. : American Council on Public
Affairs.
Kobil, Daniel T. 1991. "The Quality of Mercy Strained: Wresting the Pardoning Power
from the King." Texas Law Review, 69: 569-641.
Moore, Kathleen Dean. 1989. Pardons : Justice, Mercy, and the Public Interest. Oxford
University Press : New York.
Orman, John M. and Dorothy Rudoni. 1979. "Exercise of the President's Discretionary
Power in Criminal Justice Policy," Presidential Studies Quarterly, 9: 415-427.
Pederson, William D. 1977. "Amnesty and Presidential Behavior: A 'Barberian'
Test," Presidential Studies Quarterly 7: 175-185.
Rozell, Mark J. 1994. "President Ford's Pardon of Richard M. Nixon: Constitutional
and Political Considerations," Presidential Studies Quarterly, 24: 121-137.
Ruckman, P.S., Jr. N.D. "Executive Clemency in the United States: Origins,
Development and Analysis (1900-1993). Presidential Studies Quarterly, forthcoming.
Ruckman, P.S., Jr. 1995. "Presidential Character and Executive Clemency: A
Reexamination." Social Science Quarterly, 76: 213-221.
Ruckman, P.S., Jr. 1994a. "Policy as an Indicator of 'Original Understanding':
Executive Clemency in the Early Republic." paper presented at the Annual Meeting of
the Southern Political Science Association, Atlanta, GA.
Ruckman, P.S., Jr. 1994b. "Executive Clemency in the United States, 1900-1993: An
Empirical Analysis," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political
Science Association, New York, NY.
Ruckman, P.S., Jr. and David Kincaid. 1995. "The Forgotten Side of Lincoln's Clemency
Policy." Illinois Political Science Review, 1: 28-32.
Shichor, David and Donald R. Ranish. 1980. "President Carter's Vietnam Amnesty: An
Analysis of a Public Policy Decision," Presidential Studies Quarterly, 10: 443-50.
Survey of Release Procedures. 1939. U.S. Attorney General, v. III, U.S. Government
Printing Office : Washington D.C.
Table 2
Clemency Actions Per Year of the President's Term (1789-1932)
One Two Three Four Total
Washington (1) 0 0 0 0 0
Washington (2) 2 3 6 5 16
Adams 0 3 5 13 21
Jefferson (1) 9 11 8 17 45
Jefferson (2) 21 23 14 16 74
Madison (1) 35 19 22 38 114
Madison (2) 15 16 21 36 88
Monroe (1) 5 28 36 67 136
Monroe (2) 80 73 85 58 296
J.Q. Adams 42 46 49 46 183
Jackson (1) 42 48 57 55 202
Jackson (2) 45 42 42 55 184
Van Buren 40 24 38 66 168
W.H. Harrison 3 - - - 3
Tyler 36 72 40 61 209
Polk 44 67 68 89 268
Taylor 28 10 - - 38
Fillmore - 32 70 68 170
Pierce 34 40 34 34 142
Buchanan 21 21 37 73 152
Lincoln (1) 69 80 94 92 335
Lincoln (2) 6 - - - 6
Johnson 130 195 146 181 652
Grant (1) 108 170 127 218 623
Grant (2) 199 188 104 224 715
Hayes 137 256 175 246 814
Garfield 5 - - - -
Arthur 55 76 47 103 281
Cleveland (1) 86 102 124 160 472
Harrison 110 126 162 209 611
Cleveland (2) 195 146 158 193 692 est.
McKinley (1) 224 175 262 220 881 est.
McKinley (2) 226 - - - 226 est.
T. Roosevelt - 134 134 162 430 est.
T. Roosevelt (1) 168 124 115 84 491 est.
Taft 198 172 192 197 759
Wilson (1) 220 180 195 287 882
Wilson (2) 237 321 420 617 1595
Harding 363 325 111 - 799
Coolidge - - 157 226 383
Coolidge (2) 267 197 245 452 1161
Hoover 161 368 221 635 1385
Sources: National Archives Microfilm Set T967, Annual Reports of the Attorney General, estimates based on Humbert (1941).
Table 1
Clemency Activity and Presidential Character, 1789-1993
# Clemency # Clemency
Active Positive Actions Passive Positive Actions
------------------- --------------------
Washington 16 Monroe 419
Madison 196 Van Buren 168
Jefferson 119 Fillmore 170
Lincoln 343 Pierce 142
T. Roosevelt 981 Buchanan 150
F. Roosevelt 3687 Grant 1332
Truman 2044 Hayes 893
Kennedy 575 Arthur 337
Ford 409 B.Harrison 613
Carter 566 McKinley 918
Bush 77 Taft 758
---- Harding 800
9,013 Reagan 406
----
Active Negative 7,106
-------------------
J.Adams 21 Passive Negative
J.Q.Adams 183 ---------------------
Jackson 386 Tyler 209
Polk 268 Taylor 38
A.Johnson 654 Coolidge 1545
Cleveland 1107 Eisenhower 1157
Wilson 2480 ----
Hoover 1385 2,949
L.Johnson 1187
Nixon 926
----
8,597
N= 27,665
Averages : Active Presidents 839 Active-Positive 819
Passive Presidents 591 Active-Negative 860
Positive Presidents 672 Passive-Positive 547
Negative Presidents 825 Passive Negative 737
* Classifications from Taft to Bush based on Barber (1992). All others based on Maranell
(1970).
Table 3
Monthly Clemency Activity :
March 1789 - March 1893, March 1907 - February 1933
Actions % total highest month avg.actions
---------- ---------- ------------------- ---------------
March 1442 .09 23 years 10.13
April 1430 .09 10 years 9.93
May 1344 .08 15 years 9.33
June 1686 .10 28 years 11.71
July 1414 .09 16 years 9.89
August 1166 .07 9 years 8.15
September 946 .06 6 years 6.62
October 1324 .08 12 years 9.26
November 1053 .07 8 years 7.36
December 1442 .09 7 years 10.08
January 1373 .08 14 years 9.60
February 1367 .08 15 years 9.56
March * 183 .01 7.32
-----
16,170
* The first day of the month through the 3rd for exiting administrations.
Source: National Archives Microfilm Set T967, Annual Reports of the Attorney General.