Biddle v. Perovich
| Decision Date | 31 May 1927 |
| Docket Number | No. 771,771 |
| Parties | BIDDLE, Warden, v. PEROVICH |
| Court | U.S. Supreme Court |
Mr. George T. McDermott, of Topeka, Kan., for Perovich.
[Argument of Counsel from page 481 intentionally omitted] Mr. William D. Mitchell, Sol. Gen., of Washington, D. C., and Robert P. Reeder, Sp. Asst. Atty. Gen., for warden.
[Argument of Counsel from pages 482-484 intentionally omitted] Mr. Justice HOLMES delivered the opinion of the Court.
The Circuit Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has certified questions of law to this Court upon facts of which we give an abridged statement. Perovich was convicted in Alaska of murder; the verdict being that he was 'guilty of murder in the first degree and that he suffer death.' On September 15, 1905, he was sentenced to be hanged and the judgment was affirmed by this Court. Perovich v. United States, 205 U. S. 86, 27 S. Ct. 456, 51 L. Ed. 722. Respites were granted from time to time, and on June 5, 1909, President Taft executed a document by which he purported to 'commute the sentence of the said Vuco Perovich * * * to imprisonment for life in a penitentiary to be designated by the Attorney General of the United States.' Thereupon Perovich was transferred from jail in Alaska to a penitentiary in Washington and some years later to one in Leavenworth, Kansas. In November, 1918, Perovich, reciting that his sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment, applied for a pardon-and did the same thing again on December 10, 1921. On February 20, 1925, he filed in the District Court for the District of Kansas an application for a writ of habeas corpus on the ground that his removal from jail to a penitentiary and the order of the President were without his consent and without legal authority. The District Judge adopted this view and thereupon ordered the prisoner to be set at large. (9 F.(2d) 124). We pass over the difficulties in the way of this conclusion and confine ourselves to the questions pro- posed. The first is:
'Did the President have authority to commute the sentence of Perovich from death to life imprisonment?'
Both sides agree that the act of the President was properly styled a commutation of sentence, but the counsel of Perovich urge that when the attempt is to commute a punishment to one of a different sort it cannot be done without the convict's consent. The Solicitor General presented a very persuasive argument that in no case is such consent necessary to an unconditional pardon and that it never had been adjudged necessary before Burdick v. United States, 236 U. S. 79, 35 S. Ct. 267, 59 L. Ed. 476. He argued that the earlier cases here and in England turned on the necessity that the pardon should be pleaded, but that when it was brought to the judicial knowledge of the Court 'and yet the felon pleads not guilty and waives the pardon, he shall not be hanged.' Jenkins, 129, Third Century, case 62.
We will not go into history, but we will say a word about the principles of pardons in the law of the United States. A pardon in our days is not a private act of grace from an individual happening to possess power. It is a part of the Constitutional scheme. When granted it is the determination of the ultimate authority that the public welfare will be better served by inflicting less than what the judgment fixed. See Ex parte Grossman, 267 U. S. 87, 120, 121, 45 S. Ct. 332, 69 L. Ed. 527, 38 A. L. R. 131. Just as the original punishment would be imposed without regard to the prisoner's consent and in the teeth of his will, whether he liked it or...
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...the time they were granted, they were also viewed as serving important and necessary public interests. In Biddle v. Perovich, 274 U.S. 480, 486, 47 S.Ct. 664, 71 L.Ed. 1161 (1927), Justice Holmes most eloquently A pardon in our days is not a private act of grace from an individual happening......
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