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This study builds on a close examination of an archive of files that advised the Australian Commonwealth Executive on Papua New Guineans found guilty of capital offences in PNG between 1954 and 1965. These files provide telling insight into conceptions held by officials at different stages of the justice process into justice, savagery and civilisation, and colonialism and Australia's role in the world. The particular combination of idealism and self-interest, liberalism and paternalism, and justice and authoritarianism axiomatic to Australian colonialism becomes apparent and enables discussion of Australia’s administration of PNG in the lead-up to the acceptance of independence as an immediate policy goal. The files show Australia gathering the authority to grant mercy into the hands of the Commonwealth and then devolving it back to the territories. In these transitions, the capital case review files show the trajectory of Australian colonialism during a period when the administration was unsure of the duration and nature of its future relationship with PNG.

The modern era of American capital punishment-the period starting in 1976, when the Supreme Court reauthorized the use of the death penalty after invalidating all extant capital statutes in Furman v. Georgia3 in 1972-saw a stunning drop in the use of capital clemency, which had been a substantial and routine practice prior to the Court's intervention, even in states that used the death penalty the most. [...]we contend that constitutional regulation of capital punishment has not significantly diminished (much less eliminated) the important role of clemency in redressing numerous deficiencies in the American capital system. [...]perhaps more surprisingly, constitutional regulation has generated new grounds for robust reconsideration of capital sentences. Interestingly, however, scholars have not converged on an authoritative data set of nationwide clemency grants, with significant disparities in modern-era clemency counts among (for example) the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and Michael Radelet and Barbara Zsembik's independent 1993 study.6 Radelet and Zsembik observe that \"there is no single source which provides statistics regarding the frequency of clemency and the names of prisoners who are awarded clemency in capital cases. Rather, the Court has engaged in an ongoing endeavor of top-down constitutional regulation of all aspects of the practice of capital punishment, including the requirements for statutory validity, the eligibility for execution of classes of offenses and offenders, the conduct of capital defense counsel, and the structure of capital trials, post-conviction procedures, end-stage litigation, and the execution process.

The Office of the Pardon Attorney has served presidents well for many decades, but recent presidents have become frustrated with it for various reasons. In this article, I examine the office’s past and present, then look at possible reforms to better prepare the clemency screening process for the Biden administration and its successors.

In 1977, a company convicted of conspiring with the mob asked President Jimmy Carter for a pardon. Government officials speculated that the President could grant the request, but ultimately the President decided that the company did not deserve clemency. Nearly fifty years later, President Donald Trump pardoned a company and commuted the sentence of another. People are again wondering whether the pardon power covers companies, but no one can offer evidence either way. History shows that the pardon power covers companies. Before the Founding, the King would often pardon corporations. Both the City of London and the Massachusetts Bay Company were pardoned before the Founders were even born. The Pardon Clause and many of its state analogues were drafted against that backdrop. That the President can pardon companies might feel surprising or even unsettling. But the prerogative fits comfortably into the nation's separation of powers. Congress can make pardoning corporations less attractive by refusing to appropriate refunds for pardoned fines or replacing crimes with civil infractions.