Pardoning powers of the President

Pardoning powers of the President

Pardon may be the exercise of mercy or clemency by the President and Governors. The pardoning power is a wide discretionary power of the state to relax the severity of legal punishment and to reduce the gravity and consequences of governmental action. Under Article 72, Constitution of India, the President has been vested with powers to grant pardon, reprieve, respite, or remission of punishment.

Pardoning power of President

A pardon serves as a waiver of punishment for those convicted of federal crimes for which they have been sentenced. The following are the pardoning powers of the President:

Pardon: A pardon is executive clemency granted by the President to a convict with the power to commute or extinguish. Unlike a commutation, a pardon does not change the conviction, but rather, it forgives, or absolves the sentence and removes the punishment.

Commutation: Commutation is applied to criminal sentences, while executive clemency is applied to civil cases. Commutation extends the mercy of the court by substituting a lesser penalty for the major one. On the other hand, clemency sets aside the sentence without any substitution of the sentence. In a broad sense, commutation and clemency both mean reprieve or pardon.

Remission: Remission of the sentence is a way of reducing a sentence of a convict without changing its character. It means that an act deficient in form but having complete substance is better than nothing.

Respite: It denotes awarding a lesser sentence in place of one originally awarded due to some special fact, such as the physical disability of a convict or the pregnancy of a woman offender.

Reprieve: Respite in dictionary terms is "Affording temporary relief." It implies a stay of the execution of a sentence (especially that of death) for a temporary period. Its purpose is to enable the convict to have time to seek pardon or commutation from the President.

Difference between pardoning powers of president and governor

There have some difference between the scope of the pardoning power of the President and the pardoning power of the Governor. Some of them are

1. The scope of the President’s pardoning power under Article 72 is wider than the pardoning power of the Governor under Article 161.
2. The power of the President to grant pardon extends in cases where the punishment or sentence is by a Court Martial but Article 161 does not provide any such power to the Governor.
3. President can pardon a sentence of the convict given by the court-martial or the military court whereas Governor does not have the power to pardon the sentence inflicted by the court-martial on the convict.
4. The President can grant pardon in all cases where the sentence given is sentence of death but pardoning power of Governor does not extend to death sentence cases.
5. President’s pardoning powers are granted for the cases where the convict has committed an offence against a Union law whereas Governor’s pardoning powers are granted for the cases where the convict has committed an offence against a state law.