Word: pardons
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...late Stephen J. Field) was an associate justice of the U. S. Supreme Court (1863-97). She had devoted most of her life to welfare work and during some 52 years had failed to exhibit anything in the nature of criminal tendencies. Yet last week it required a pardon from Governor C. C. Young of California to save Charlotte Anita Whitney from an indeterminate sentence of from 1 to 14 years in the San Quentin prison...
Meanwhile M. le Président Gaston Doumergue of France received hundreds of appeals to pardon M. Daudet. The government was reputedly much inclined to this step; and no attempt whatever was made by the police last week to arrest Editor Daudet, who dined sumptuously on all manner of delicacies sent him by Parisians who admire his flashing spirit, consider him at worst harmless, at best a priceless "character...
Whereupon Mr. Perovich grumbled, protested. He preferred a death sentence to a life sentence. And, in 1925, a Kansas District Judge ruled that the presidential right to annul a sentence (by pardon) did not include the right to alter it (by commutation) without the prisoner's consent. Thus mercy became high-handed, clemency a usurpation. Furthermore, since Mr. Perovich was being illegally held, his detention could not continue, so he was released under a habeas corpus writ. At large, Mr. Perovich opened a barber shop, has spent the last two years law-abidingly wielding shears and razor...
...Supreme Court, the Chief Justice of which is, of course, the same William Howard Taft whose 1909 action constituted the point at issue. Dignified, fairminded, Chief Justice Taft took no part in the court's deliberations. But the Court upheld him, reversed the Kansas decision. It held that the pardoning power was part of the machinery of the law, that this machinery operates without regard to the consent of those affected. It held also that changing a death sentence to a life sentence was a legitimate part of the pardoning power, since a life sentence is commonly regarded as less...
Next day even Le Figaro, usually opposed to every policy of Royalist Daudet, printed an open letter to President Doumergue of the Republic, asking a free pardon for M. Daudet and stating: "If he is imprisoned at the same time as this adherent of the Third International [M. Cachin] he will be released next day by popular demand...