NCJ Number
88369
Journal
Revue de science criminelle et de droit penal compare Issue: 3 Dated: (July-September 1982) Pages: 641-653
Date Published
1982
Length
13 pages
Annotation
There exists in the French justice system a little known and little studied but commonly used practice of granting executive clemency to certain offenders sentenced to short-term incarceration or fines. A study examined procedures for this avenue of evading judicial penalties to ascertain who receives these pardons, for what kind of offenses, and on what grounds.
Abstract
The analysis reviewed records of a representative sample of the 33,000 cases filed for clemency between 1976 and 1979. Results yielded profiles of the most common types of offenders who are granted clemency. They are a woman over 35, convicted and sentenced to prison for passing bad checks and a man between 25 and 35 convicted in absentia with a prison sentence for defaulting on alimony payments. In most cases, these people are in the process of indemnifying their victims. They have received incarceration sentences for offenses which are commonly sanctioned with fines or remand imprisonment. Many of those appealing for clemency have been tried and sentenced in absentia. Thus, it appears that the clemency procedure serves to redress a dysfunction of the justice system in cases where judicial error is evidenced but court appeal is not appropriate. A clemency decision usually mitigates the unduly severe judicial sentences by substituting other conditions such as fines, remanded prison terms, or probation. Intended as a special power reserved for the President of the Republic for discretionary intervention in extraordinary cases, this generalized application of executive clemency has created a bureaucratic apparatus with undue discretionary authority. The clemency office is part of the President's chancellery, where functionaries discretionarily reject or grant clemency requests which cannot be appealed, exercising a power that the law entrusted only to the person of the President. Footnotes and tabular data are given.