If presidents could self-pardon, they could engage in monstrously wrongful and criminal conduct with impunity," she wrote.
Forgiveness also admits of an entirely self-referential variety (i.e. self-forgiveness), whereas official acts of self-pardoning are at best controversial, and possibly without legal or political justification.
The point is that a self-pardon is uncharted legal territory.
The most effective way to move forward and experience growth is through self-pardon.
So too, as a matter of history and legal determination, the prospect for self-pardon lacks all credibility.
While some doubt remains about whether the president has the authority to pardon himself, a self-pardon is most likely legally ineffective from shielding a president from future federal prosecution.
A handful of Republican members of Congress cited the possibility of self-pardon as a justification for their votes to impeach President Bill Clinton, which is discussed in the introduction to this Oklahoma Law Review article.
If the Supreme Court eventually heard a lawsuit challenging a presidential self-pardon, justices would be unlikely to side with Trump, Spaulding suspects, because "we have a long tradition of not letting one person be judge and jury of their own case, which is essentially what he would be doing".
Most legal experts supported that view, although the arguments as to why vary from natural law (first principles such as 'no man can be a judge in his own case') to constitutional structure (a self-pardon would defeat the purposes of Article I, Section 4, which expressly allows officeholders removed by impeachment to be subject to criminal prosecution).
"A presidential self-pardoning power would seriously undermine the rule of law.
So the night felt unpleasantly self-congratulatory, despite the fact that Amnesty International deserve our praise and support, pending some horrible miscarriage of justice or fraud that has yet to come to light (pardon the cynical self-check — it's been that kind of news cycle).
