THE EXAMPLE OF JESUS CHRIST

The woman's guilt was clear. “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.”Footnote ¹¹ The prescribed punishment was clear as well. “Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women.”Footnote ¹² But when Jesus challenged anyone without sin to throw the first stone, the accusers left the scene.Footnote ¹³ Then Jesus said to the woman, “Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”Footnote ¹⁴

An inspiring story, you say? Suppose a US president were to free someone guilty of a capital offense with no punishment at all, simply warning her not to do it again. Suppose that, when challenged to defend his action, the president declared that no one is entitled to punish unless he is without sin himself. Suppose the president granted clemency without mentioning any redeeming virtue of the offender or any extenuating circumstance of the crime. Suppose he said nothing to distinguish the pardoned offender's case from that of any other offender.

One might wonder whether this president opposed criminal punishment altogether. If only people without sin are entitled to punish, no one is. And if the president did not mean to bring the punishment of criminals to an end, did he free this one at random? Did he see clemency as sport or as an expression of tender sentiments on a lovely day? Is there an alternative?

However you look at it, the president's pardon was outrageous. He should be impeached.

Was Jesus's view of clemency as radical as the case of the woman taken in adultery makes it seem? John Calvin said that “although Christ remits one's sins, He does not subvert the social order or abolish legal sentences and punishments.” Calvin condemned as “Popish theology” the idea that “Christ has brought in the law of grace, by which adulterers may be freed from punishment.”Footnote ¹⁵

Someone seeking support for Calvin's tough, “non-Popish” view can suppose that the Bible provides an incomplete account of the woman's case. He can, if he likes, accept the imaginative reconstruction offered by J. Duncan M. Derrett.Footnote ¹⁶

Derrett notes that Jewish law allowed conviction only on the testimony of two witnessesFootnote ¹⁷ and that people committing a capital offense would have made every effort to conceal it. In all probability, Derrett says, witnesses did not simply stumble upon the woman in the act of adultery. Instead, the woman's husband had learned of her disloyalty. Because the husband could not testify against his wife, he arranged to have two or more witnesses observe a later tryst. These witnesses might have warned the woman and prevented her crime, but they conspired with the husband to cause her death. When Jesus said, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her,” he was not broadly condemning the hypocrisy of punishing others while leaving one's own sins unacknowledged. Rather, he was inviting any accuser who was not complicit in the woman's crime to begin an execution. Confronted with this challenge, the accusers slunk away one by one.

One can also, if one likes, attribute to Jesus a modern recognition of the injustice of the ancient law of adultery. This law required death for a married woman who had sex with someone other than her husband, and it demanded death for her lover as well. But it did not punish either participant in sexual intercourse between a married man and a woman other than his wife.Footnote ¹⁸

John's gospel does not reveal the fate of the man caught in the act with the woman. Perhaps he was a fast runner, or perhaps he already had been executed. Perhaps he was recruited by the husband to entrap the woman and then was allowed to go free. Perhaps he paid a bribe to escape prosecution (something a married woman, unable to own property independently, could not have done). Or perhaps the man was simply the beneficiary of discriminatory prosecution. (An aside: Many scholars do not believe that the story of the woman taken in adultery was part of John's gospel. In 383, however, Saint Jerome included this story in the Latin version of the gospels he prepared on the basis of earlier Greek texts. The church declared Jerome's version authoritative at the Council of Trent more than 1,100 years later.Footnote ¹⁹)

Could one reasonably applaud Jesus while booing the modern president by distinguishing between divine and earthly justice? In about 386, Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, replied to a judge who asked whether, as a Christian, he could properly sentence offenders to death. Ambrose said that the church did not forbid capital punishment, because this punishment might repress crime and because “clemency should proceed from [the judges’] own free-will and forbearance, rather than from any legal necessity.”Footnote ²⁰

After reciting the story of the woman taken in adultery, however, Ambrose said of Jesus:

Pardons appear to be as old as punishment. As best I can tell, every legal system has provided for them. At a minimum, Jesus's teachings suggest a liberal use of this power.

EQUALITY

Someone who sought to identify the most troublesome presidential pardon in American history might consider Bill Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich. Clinton pardoned Rich, a billionaire fugitive from justice, on his last day in office, only hours before the inauguration of George W. Bush. Rich had fled the United States as he was about to be charged with tax evasion and conspiring to purchase more than six million barrels of oil from Iran while that country was holding fifty-two US hostages.

Although Clinton's chief of staff and his White House counsel opposed clemency for Rich, Rich's ex-wife, Denise Rich, supported it. She had contributed more than $1 million to the Democratic Party and its candidates; $450,000 to Clinton's library fund; $100,000 to a fund supporting Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign; $10,000 to the president's legal defense fund; and $7,375 worth of furniture to the Clintons. She also had presented a gold-plated saxophone to the president at a charity ball. Denise Rich not only wrote letters to the president but also pressed a White House social secretary for an invitation to a White House dinner. Seated at Clinton's table with such notables as Barbra Streisand and Maya Angelou, she sought a private moment with the president to emphasize that pardoning her former husband would mean a great deal to her.Footnote ²²

On the day Clinton pardoned Rich, he also granted clemency to his half-brother (Roger Clinton), two former members of his cabinet (John Deutch and Henry Cisneros), one cabinet member's son (Richard Riley, Jr.), a former cabinet member's chief-of-staff (Ron Blackley), a former member of Congress (Mel Reynolds), a former governor who had been a college friend (J. Fife Symington III), a lawyer who had managed Clinton's Georgetown campaign for student body president (Paul Prosperi), one of the president's partners in the Whitewater real estate venture (Susan McDougal), and two applicants who, apparently without Clinton's knowledge, had paid a brother of Hillary Clinton more than $200,000 apiece to support their applications.Footnote ²³

Clinton's last-day pardons lent support to the argument of some notable opponents of pardons (at least in democratic societies)—Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, Cesare Beccaria, and Baron de Montesquieu. These critics maintained that pardons inevitably render justice unequal.Footnote ²⁴ President George W. Bush, who himself incurred criticism for remitting the sentence of his vice president's chief of staff, wrote in his memoirs, “I came to see the massive injustice in the system. If you had connections to the president, you could insert your case into the last-minute frenzy.”Footnote ²⁵ Reformers have proposed that a body of rules should replace “case-by-case pardons” to promote the equal treatment of similarly situated applicants.Footnote ²⁶

Jesus's championship of people at the bottom of the social pyramid—Samaritans, prostitutes, women, children, the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the meek, the naked, the homeless, the lepers, the tax collectors, and the prisoners—makes clear that he would have disapproved of partisanship toward the rich and powerful in granting clemency.Footnote ²⁷ Yet Jesus's miracles and his pardon of only one adulteress also raise issues of equality. Why did he restore the sight of some and not others? Jesus made little or no effort to treat like cases alike.

Perhaps equal treatment does not matter in working miracles—supernatural events to which no one is entitled. And although equal treatment does matter in granting clemency, it may matter less in this phase of the criminal process than in most others. In granting clemency, might governors and presidents be seen as mini-miracle workers?

Consider this thought experiment: President P has known Member of Congress C for many years, and when C was indicted for mail fraud, convicted, and sentenced, P followed his case closely. P believes that C was treated unjustly. If the merits of C's application were all that mattered, P would pardon him.

Nevertheless, P hesitates. He thinks: “There may be other applicants who were treated as unfairly as C. Indeed, there probably are many of them. But because I do not know their cases as well as I know C's, I cannot be sure. To find out, I would need to investigate their cases in depth, and it isn't my job to do over what the criminal justice process already has done. Unlike C, the other applicants haven't overcome my presumption that the criminal justice system got it right.”

P also thinks: “My friend C is a wealthy, white college graduate, and many of the others who are likely to have meritorious cases are none of those things. To favor applicants whom I know or whose friends have my ear is systematically to favor the already advantaged.”

Should P's concern about equal treatment lead him to reject C's application for a pardon? Or should he conclude that neither his inability to provide equal justice nor his predicable tilt in favor of wealthy white men should keep him from redressing the injustice he sees in C's case?

In granting clemency, presidents have an obligation not to treat like cases differently, but I think they have no obligation to treat like cases alike. To put the point less cryptically, presidents have an ethical duty not to discriminate but no duty to act affirmatively or to expend resources to ensure equal treatment. A policy of granting clemency to whites and not people of other races obviously would be outrageous, and so would a policy of granting clemency to political supporters simply because they are supporters. Nevertheless, affirmative measures to ensure equal treatment probably should be regarded as supererogatory—admirable when they can be undertaken without unduly sacrificing other goals but not imperative.

In this respect, chief executives may differ from judges and other criminal justice officials. Although presidents do not promise to render justice in every case, judges do.

A PLACE FOR MERCY IN CRIMINAL PROCEDURE

Asking whether chief executives render justice or grant mercy when they pardon poses a false dichotomy. They sometimes grant clemency without doing either one, and they sometimes do both at the same time.

President Kennedy's commutation of the sentence of Soviet spy Rudolf Able to facilitate his exchange for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers was clemency that did neither.Footnote ²⁸ This commutation implied neither that the president considered the commuted sentence unjust nor that he felt merciful toward the spy. Other situations, however, show presidents both rendering justice and granting mercy. Even when pardons correct substantive injustice, granting them can be merciful.

When a president approves clemency because a prisoner's innocence has been shown or because the prisoner's punishment is excessive, the president does justice. Yet if presidents need not treat like cases alike—if they have no obligation even to listen—affording any procedure at all is merciful. If presidents are entitled to treat the judgments of the “regular” criminal justice system as conclusive, granting relief from any of these judgments is supererogatory. Presidents commonly do render justice when they pardon, but because they have no obligation to render justice, they also grant mercy.

This view of clemency as a hybrid of justice and mercy (just in substance and merciful in procedure) becomes plausible only when clemency is seen as a dispensable safety valve at the far end of a just legal system. Chief Justice Marshall took this view when he wrote for the Supreme Court in 1833, “A pardon is an act of grace.”Footnote ²⁹

Justice Holmes, however, apparently took a different view when he wrote for the Court in 1927, “A pardon in our days is not a private act of grace . . . . It is part of the Constitutional scheme.”Footnote ³⁰ When clemency is seen as simply one more tier of review and presidents are thought responsible for doing justice, the distinction between clemency and other phases of the criminal justice system collapses.

For example, a new technology might enable authorities to identify a substantial number of wrongly convicted prisoners with a high degree of certainty, and a legal system that provided no mechanism for releasing these prisoners would be unjust. Without affording any judicial or administrative remedy, however, courts and legislatures might look to executive clemency to do the job. These authorities might say with the US Supreme Court, “Clemency . . . is the historic remedy for preventing miscarriages of justice when judicial process has been exhausted.”Footnote ³¹ In this situation, reviewing convictions produced by the “regular” criminal justice system would not seem supererogatory.

SHOULD PUBLIC OFFICIALS BE MERCIFUL IN SUBSTANCE AS WELL AS PROCEDURE?

In arguing that doing justice can be merciful when an official has no obligation even to consider an applicant's case, I have used the word mercy in a different way from the definition propounded by Alwynne Smart (a decision “not to inflict what is agreed to be the just penalty, all things considered”). But I now turns to Smart's kind of mercy. Should officials be merciful in substance as well as procedure? When, if ever, should they remit punishment agreed to be just out of compassion for the person whose punishment is foregone?

One cannot sensibly answer this question without considering how broad the concept of justice should be. The more sophisticated one's understanding of justice becomes, the less room it allows for mercy. With a primitive concept of justice—an eye for an eye—mercy has much work to do. Acknowledging that justice depends as much upon circumstances and personal characteristics as upon physical action and harm, however, shrinks mercy's role. And recognizing that developments after an offense (such as unprompted repentance) can bear on what punishment an offender deserves diminishes the role of mercy still further.

Should the concept of justice grow to the point that the space for mercy simply vanishes? A president may approve a pardon because a prisoner deserves it (say, because new evidence establishes his innocence), or he may approve a pardon for instrumental reasons (say, to facilitate an exchange of prisoners). If the applicant does not deserve a pardon and the pardon serves no instrumental purpose, however, it seems improper. Mercy alone looks like a bad reason for clemency. Perhaps the recognition of mercy as a virtue always reflects an impoverished concept of justice—one that does not truly render to each his due.Footnote ³²

For private individuals, a line between duty and supererogation seems useful (difficult though the line is to draw). Buying a stereo system with funds the purchaser could have donated to Doctors Without Borders is not wrongful even if making the donation would have been more virtuous. An aspiring musician has no duty to pattern his life on that of Mother Teresa rather than Elvis even if emulating Mother Teresa would be nobler. One's moral obligation stops short of making the most virtuous choice.

A public official, however, stands in a different place. He is a fiduciary, charged with advancing the public's interest rather than his own. Unlike a private individual drawing on his own bank account, an official cannot properly draw on the public treasury to make a gift to Doctors Without Borders, and just as an official may not give public cash to people not entitled to it, he may not make personal gifts of noncash benefits.Footnote ³³

When an official must decide whether to remit criminal punishment, supererogation seems impossible. In exercising his discretion, the official must advance the public interest as best he can. Serving any other goal is a violation of his duty, and doing better than his best is impossible. No space is left for supererogation. In the absence of an instrumental public purpose or a clear indication that the public favors making unmerited gifts, an official should not grant undeserved clemency. I note, however, that an undeserved remission of punishment sometimes can reflect the willingness of society as a whole to forgive.

To test whether, as I have just argued, officials should hardly ever view mercy alone as a sufficient reason for remitting punishment, this section considers three cases. They are among the strongest I can think of for calling legitimate official action merciful.

First, consider compassionate release of the dying. Someone who has been imprisoned fifteen years for a robbery has only weeks to live, and his wife and children ask the governor to allow him to die at home. Describing the governor's release of the prisoner as an act of mercy seems natural and conventional, but this characterization implies that the governor has made a gift, that he would not have violated any moral duty by leaving the prisoner confined, and that he had no obligation to base his decision on what the prisoner, his family, and the public deserved. Might it be better for the governor to view his task as one of doing justice—including justice to the prisoner who, despite his crime, remained entitled to humane treatment as his life approached its end?

Or consider a hypothetical case posed by Saul Touster.Footnote ³⁴ The Civil War has ended, and a recently emancipated slave has stolen a horse and wagon in order to search for members of his family who were sold to a plantation owner in another state. The former slave might be a plausible candidate for a defense of necessity, but recognizing this defense would declare his action justified and would encourage others to engage in similar conduct. Recognizing a formal defense would license the former slave to continue to steal wagons until he achieved his goal. The use of a low-visibility discretionary mechanism—refusal to prosecute, jury nullification, or executive clemency—would be less problematic. A virtuous prosecutor might decline to prosecute and then take up a collection to buy the former slave a horse and wagon.

The prosecutor's private donation of a wagon could be seen as supererogatory. Should his refusal to prosecute be regarded as supererogatory as well? If the only measure of justice were what the law provides, the prosecutor's action would fit Alwynne Smart's definition; he would have chosen not to inflict the penalty deemed just. In this case, however, the law book badly missed the mark (or rather it would have if it had not authorized the prosecutor to make exceptions). The prosecutor did justice by declining to prosecute, and perhaps he would have violated his moral duty by doing anything else.

Finally, consider a case in which private mercy influenced public punishment. On October 26, 2018, the remains of Matthew Shepard were interred in the National Cathedral, a shrine where visitors also can view the tombs of Woodrow Wilson, Helen Keller, and other notable Americans. It had been twenty years since Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson lured Shepard from a Laramie bar, beat his skull with a .357 Magnum, burned him, and strung him on a fence to die. McKinney and Henderson killed Shepard because he was gay. His internment was delayed for two decades because his parents feared desecration of his grave by people like those who demonstrated at his funeral with signs reading “Matt in Hell” and “God Hates Fags.”

One of Shepard's killers, Henderson, avoided capital punishment by agreeing to testify against the other, McKinney. Shepard's parents, Dennis and Judy Shepard, then persuaded a reluctant prosecutor not to seek the death penalty for McKinney. Here are excerpts from Dennis Shepard's courtroom remarks on the subject of mercy:

Dennis and Judy Shepard supported the death penalty. They saw their choice to spare McKinney as merciful—a gift to an undeserving beneficiary. One could accept this characterization without viewing the prosecutor's acquiescence in their choice the same way.

Whether survivors should have a voice in determining a murder's punishment is a challenging issue.Footnote ³⁶ Delegating part of this choice to these private parties affords authority over offenders’ lives to people whose interests would disqualify them from serving as jurors, and it ensures the unequal administration of justice. Whether an offender lives or dies may turn, not on a judgment by a community's authorized representatives, but on whether the offender victimized someone whose family is charitable or vindictive or someone who had no family at all. The separation of criminal law from tort law in England roughly a thousand years ago was a civilizing step, and turning back from that step may diminish the sense that crime wrongs all of us.

Many champions of the death penalty, however, see this form of punishment as a means of providing closure to victims’ families—in Franklin Zimring's words, as state-sponsored psychotherapy.Footnote ³⁷ One implication of viewing “closure” as a justification for the death penalty is that a survivor should be able to say with Dennis Shepard that mercy, not death, is his path toward closure. If taking account of survivors’ wishes is appropriate and if these parties may approve an undeserved remission of punishment, there is a place for substantive mercy in the administration of criminal justice. Even on this questionable hypothesis, however, the prerogative of mercy ordinarily belongs to victims or their representatives, not public officials.

DID SHAKESPEARE AND JESUS GET IT RIGHT?

The finest speech ever given in the English language on the subject of mercy took a different view from the one I have advanced. Although I have maintained that public officials have less justification for being merciful (in the Alwynne Smart sense) than private individuals, Shakespeare declared mercy one of a ruler's noblest virtues:

Did Shakespeare err? Although the character who declaims these great lines purports to plead for mercy rather than justice, does she in fact plead for justice? In urging a nobleman to temper justice, does she mistakenly take the law as the measure of justice? Does she in fact favor tempering only an unjust law? Does she truly beg for an official gift to an undeserving wrongdoer, or does she decry a cruel and brutal law, one that allowed a creditor to enforce a vicious penalty clause?

Opposing Alwynne Smart-style mercy implies no support for harsh punishment. To the contrary, it often makes mandatory the generosity and lenient treatment that pleas for mercy treat as optional. I have advocated narrowing the concept of mercy only as far as the concept of justice expands. An appropriate concept of justice sees humane treatment as a public official's obligation and an offender's right.

And yet, however expansive the concept of justice becomes, occasions for undeserved mercy will remain. “Be merciful,” Jesus Christ said, “just as your Father is merciful.”Footnote ³⁹ “Forgive, and you will be forgiven.”Footnote ⁴⁰ And at the end: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”Footnote ⁴¹

Although Jesus accompanied his final plea for mercy with an appeal to justice (“they do not know what they are doing”), he repeatedly championed Alwynne Smart-style mercy—the remission of punishment as a gift to the undeserving. Consider, for example, this familiar passage of the Sermon on the Mount—one that links forgiving wrongdoers and foregoing punishment with giving to the poor:

The sacred texts of Jesus's own religion endorsed the principle he repudiated—an eye for an eye.Footnote ⁴³ In place of this principle, he urged, not a broader concept of justice, but radical forgiveness. Inviting a burglar who steals your cash to take your jewels as well is supererogatory, if indeed it is virtuous at all. (Your offer might shame some burglars and lead to their reform, but many others would be likely to say, “Thanks, Sucker.” Allowing them to take your jewels with your blessing probably would not be good for them, for you, or for society.Footnote ⁴⁴)

Jesus commended a father who, rejecting his prodigal son's proposal for justice (“Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”), pardoned the son, and celebrated his return.Footnote ⁴⁵ And although Jesus directed his prescription for mercy and forgiveness primarily to private individuals (“forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors”Footnote ⁴⁶), the case discussed at the beginning of this essay suggests that he also favored Alwynne Smart-style mercy in the administration of the criminal law. It bears repetition that, in freeing the woman taken in adultery, Jesus mentioned neither any mitigating circumstance of her crime nor any redeeming virtue of her character.

A central tenet of Christianity is that Jesus's crucifixion and death were themselves an act of Smart-style mercy. “[W]hile we still were sinners, Christ died for us.”Footnote ⁴⁷ “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”Footnote ⁴⁸ “For this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”Footnote ⁴⁹ “[W]e have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Some Christians have seen in Jesus’ atonement only his sacrifice of his life for undeserving others. In their view, Jesus saved sinners simply by offering a moral example. Others, however, have recognized a dark side of the story—a God who demanded blood for the remission of sins and accepted the blood of the innocent (at least for a time). This vision cannot be reconciled with most modern understandings of either justice or mercy.

The forgiveness offered by some of Jesus’ followers continues to astonish—for example, that voiced by survivors and family members within hours of a white supremacist's murder of nine congregants at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. A jury, however, may have taken an appropriate stand for justice when it rejected the wishes of many of these survivors and family members and sentenced the killer to death.Footnote ⁵¹

To this point, I have contended that public officials should be less willing than private individuals to approve Alwynne Smart-style mercy. Sometimes, however, deciding not to inflict the just penalty can reflect the willingness of an entire society to forgive. Consider the amnesties that public authorities have approved following wars, rebellions, and the fall of oppressive governments.

The United States Constitution established a government of checks and balances, but the framers seemed to overlook this principle in article II, section 2, clause 1. This provision gave the president an unchecked power to pardonFootnote ⁵²—a power even broader than the king's.Footnote ⁵³ When Alexander Hamilton explained the framers’ choice in Federalist 74, he argued that leaving “the prerogative of pardoning . . . as little as possible fettered or embarrassed” would serve two purposes. First, the pardon power would promote justice: “The criminal code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity, that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.” Second, remitting even deserved punishment would serve instrumental public goals: “[I]n seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments, when a welltimed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Hamilton focused on restoring public peace, but amnesties typically reflect compassion for amnesty recipients as well. After George Washington granted amnesty to participants in the Whiskey Rebellion and remitted the death sentences of two of its leaders, he told Congress that it was “consistent with the public good . . . to mingle in the operations of Government every degree of moderation and tenderness which the national justice, dignity, and safety permit.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Similar sentiments influenced John Adams's pardon of participants in Fries’ Rebellion, James Buchanan's pardon of Brigham Young and other participants in the Utah War of 1857–58, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson's amnesties and pardons for Confederate rebels, Theodore Roosevelt's pardon of participants in the Philippine insurrection, Warren Harding's pardon of Eugene V. Debs and others convicted of subverting military recruitment during World War I, Calvin Coolidge's pardon of World War I deserters, Harry Truman's amnesty for many World War II draft violators and deserters, Gerald Ford's conditional pardon of 14,000 Vietnam-era draft violators and deserters, and Jimmy Carter's unconditional amnesty for nearly everyone else who refused to serve in Vietnam.Footnote ⁵⁶

Truth and reconciliation commissions have been described as a third way between general amnesties and Nuremberg-style war-crimes trials.Footnote ⁵⁷ Notably, the South African commission granted 1,500 amnesties (from more than 7,000 applications) for crimes committed by government officers and political activists during the apartheid era. Applicants were eligible only if they disclosed their actions fully and established they acted for political reasons.Footnote ⁵⁸ Although the commission is widely credited with promoting social reconstruction and facilitating South Africa's transition to constitutional democracy,Footnote ⁵⁹ some South Africans bitterly protested the exemption of murderers and other violent offenders from the punishment they deserved.Footnote ⁶⁰

When truth and reconciliation commissions exempt offenders from punishment, they do so primarily for forward-looking public reasons, and compassion for offenders seems subordinate. Yet the goals they advance are those commonly associated with private forgiveness and mercy—healing, reconciliation, and moving on. A commission can accomplish these purposes only when most of a society is willing to forgive, and a society that has authorized a truth and reconciliation commission through democratic processes evidently is. Such a commission is likely to be the faithful agent of a public ready to put aside past wrongs and start over. Amnesty that public officials approve because it advances public purposes, however, is not supererogatory.

Mercy unmixed with instrumental and self-serving goals may be rare. Jesus repeatedly emphasized that mercy would be rewarded.Footnote ⁶¹ Jesus himself, however, exemplified pure mercy—selfless mercy, mercy unaccompanied by any instrumental objective, the remission of punishment simply as an undeserved gift. May a public body properly approve this kind of mercy? I have argued that, in the absence of clear authorization, it may not.