WORDSPEAK
To pardon or not
BY ANAND
The appeals in the context of Afzal were for the lessening of the penalty of the crime without forgiving the crime itself.
AMONG the headlines that dominated print and electronic news in India in the past month were those about the death sentence to Mohammed Afzal Guru, and about appeals in favour or against to have his sentence commuted to a lighter sentence.
Some of the headlines were: Afzal seeks presidential pardon; Afzal's mercy petition: Azad appeals to PM; Mohd Afzal's hanging may be deferred; BJP opposes clemency for Mohd Afzal; `I'll ask the President to pardon my father'; and, Afzal's family files mercy petition with President.
Clemency
The appropriate term, in this context, would have been clemency or reprieve rather than pardon.
Clemency — from Latin clementia `calm, mild' — means leniency and compassion shown toward offenders by a person or agency charged with administering justice, by a sovereign power such as a monarch or chief of state, or a competent church authority. It also meant "mildness of weather or climate", but now is used only in negation and only of the weather, as in "inclement weather".
The act of clemency is a reprieve, meaning the act of reprieving; postponing or remitting punishment; a warrant granting postponement, usually the execution of the death sentence.
A pardon, on the other hand, is the forgiveness of a crime and the penalty associated with it. The appeals in the context of Afzal were for the lessening of the penalty of the crime without forgiving the crime itself.
Pardon or reprieve
For long a prerogative of kings and queens, popes and — indeed — dictators and often abused, the act of pardoning or granting reprieve takes a different meaning in countries with democratically elected governments and an equitable system of justice. In India, the process of granting reprieves or pardons has seldom been tested or challenged until recently, but certain examples from the U.S., where pardons by the chief executive were clearly for the sake of political expediency than to correct judicial errors, will illustrate the point.
One of the more famous pardons in recent memory was granted by President Gerald Ford to former President Richard Nixon, for official misconduct, which gave rise to the Watergate scandal. Ford's successor Jimmy Carter granted amnesty to Vietnam-era draft evaders. George Bush (Sr.)'s pardoning of six Reagan administration officials accused and/or convicted in connection with the Iran-Contra affair had politics rather than compassion or human considerations written all over it. In many western countries, pardons are given for minor crimes when individuals have demonstrated that they have fulfilled their debt to society by serving a prison term, or are otherwise deserving (in the opinion of the pardoning official) of a pardon.
Pardons are sometimes offered to persons who are found to have been wrongfully convicted. Such pardons usually mean expunging the details of the criminal activity from the records.
Expediency
History shows that matters of expediency, rather than principles or moral judgements, have often been the basis of granting pardons. The Christian Church found many ways of cancelling punishment owed for sins after an individual had been forgiven by a priest. As early as the 11th century, the Church had begun granting of `indulgence' to those who went on Crusades. Such pardons could also be obtained by saying certain prayers or by performing specified good works, such as helping the needy or giving money to churches.
It was through the connection with money payments that indulgences were most often put to abuse, and they became a focus for criticism by Martin Luther and others at the Protestant reformation.
An expression associated with granting clemency is to "give quarter" or "grant quarter", which originated in the context of sparing the life of a captured enemy soldier and refraining from immediately putting him to death.
Before conventions were agreed upon to wage wars in a `civilised' way, the standard practice was to kill prisoners of war. About f our centuries ago, during the wars between the Dutch and the Spaniards, someone got the bright idea of holding captured prisoners for ransom. Thus originated an agreement in which the prisoners were given quarter, in this sense of housing them in "quarters" (barracks) that soldiers live in.
So "to grant quarter" came to mean "to provide a prisoner with shelter", and the meaning eventually broadened to mean granting reprieve to any person.
E-mail: anand@journalist.com
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