It's the president's job to be the dispenser of empathy and mercy, not the justices'. It is an integral part of his role as effector of the law, and it is the reason he is the one armed with the Pardon, rather than the Supreme Court. If the courts were the ones charged with the Pardon, then they would be, in effect, charged not only with interpreting the meaning of the law, but with determining whether or not the law is right and good on its own merits. That's to much power for an unelected body, and for the president to try and punt it their way is an asine abandoment of one of his thornier tasks. It shows either an intellectual laziness or a moral laziness on the president's part.

Voyager

Right, nutsack. Keep it up. 2010 and 2012 are looking easier and easier with you people bringing the crazy more and more each day.

Oh, and the reason pardons exist is to correct miscarriages of justice, and to allow people who have gone above and beyond the call to rehabilitate themselves to reclaim their reputations. Empathy has nothing to do with it.

In fact, it's a total mystery how you got from empathy to pardons in the first place. What would the president's power to pardon have to do with the strip search case, for example, or 99% of the other cases the Supreme Court hears?

I think you've conflated empathy with mercy. As the article explained, empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes . Mercy is the act of forgiving a wrong. Those seem to me to be two different things. And, yes, I agree with you. It is the president's job to dispense mercy.

I see intellectual laziness as starting with a conclusion, say "Barack Obama is a bad man", and then simply looking for facts to support that conclusion, versus understanding the topic at hand.

Pick up a dictionary, empathy does not equal unecessary pardons.