The Power to Pardon and Turkeys

The President and governors have the power to pardon and grant other relief and/or immunities from criminal prosecution.  The web site Pardon Power reports the news on the exercise of these powers.  As it explains, a “pardon” is

The removal of all disability or punishment. Pardons may be granted before or after conviction. Today, they are usually granted in order to restore civil rights (the right to vote, hold public office, participate in a jury, own a firearm, etc.). Pardons can have conditions attached. There has been a steady decline in the granting of pardons since 1900 whether one looks at the raw number of pardons, the percentage of applications that result in pardons or the percentage of presidential clemency decisions which result in pardons. There has, however, been a more accelerated decline since the late 1960s.

The site also defines on its home page the terms amnesty, clemency, commutation, expungement, remission, reprieve, respite, and sealing, all powers that executives can exercise unilaterally to relieve the burdens of criminal prosecution, whether that prosecution is a potential one, an ongoing one, or a completed one.

Each year the President and some governors engage in a “pardon” of a turkey, which I suppose is intended to deflect our minds from the annual mass sacrifice of turkeys for our national day of gratitude.  This year, as seattlepi.com reports, Sarah Palin’s pardon turned into an seeming parody of itself:

Moments after pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey, she gives a news conference at a turkey farm – unaware that apparently unpardoned birds are being executed behind her. MSNBC’s captions include, “Turkeys Die as Governor Palin Takes Questions from the Media,” “Gov. Sarah Palin Keeps Talking While Turkeys Get Slaughtered Behind Her,” and “Gov. Palin Apparently Oblivious to Turkey Carnage over Her Shoulder.”

As the Gothamist notes, this is “probably why the White House Turkey Pardon is done at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and not at a slaughterhouse.” Then again, another law professor writes: “Deal with it, you candy-asses. If you eat meat, something like that is going on in the background for you too.”  A Palin supporter writes, “After she’s sworn in in 2013, I hope President Palin arranges for a ritual turkey slaughter to be going on behind her at every press conference,”  Another: “Farmers kill animals. Then they sell them. Grocery stores package them. Meat-eaters buy them and eat them. This is no big deal – except if you reside in the Ivory Tower or the David Brooks/Kathleen Parker/Arianna Huffington/Daily Kos intellectual complex.”  Still another likes the suggestion that Palin “did it on purpose. Tough call: I’m sure she wasn’t fazed by the sight, but it certainly isn’t above her to undermine the stupidity of the ‘turkey pardon’ tradition. If she was having a little passive-aggressive fun, she’s certainly earned it.

From a different point of view, as Joe Windish observes, Michael Pollan wrote in The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

Sometimes I think that all it would take to clarify our feelings about eating meat, and in the process begin to redeem animal agriculture, would be to simply pass a law requiring all the sheet-metal walls of all the CAFOs [concentrated animal feeding operation], and even the concrete walls of the slaughterhouses, to be replaced with glass. If there’s any new right we need to establish, maybe this is the one: The right, I mean, to look. … The industrialization-and brutalization-of animals in America is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. No other people in history has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.

The turkey pardoned this year by the President, incidentally, is known as the “National Thanksgiving Turkey.”  This year’s National Thanksgiving Turkey, according to the White House, was  flown after its pardon “first class to Disneyland Resort in Southern California, where he [was] the grand marshal of ‘Disney’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.’ After the parade, guests will be able to visit the turkey in Frontierland section.”