Burdick v. United States

Burdick v. United States
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued December 16, 1914 Decided January 25, 1915
Full case name	George Burdick v. United States
Citations	236 U.S. 79 (more) 35 S. Ct. 267; 59 L. Ed. 476; 1915 U.S. LEXIS 1799
Court membership
Case opinions
Majority	McKenna, joined by White, Holmes, Day, Hughes, Van Devanter, Lamar, Pitney
McReynolds took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.

Burdick v. United States, 236 U.S. 79 (1915), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that:

A pardon is an act of grace, proceeding from the power intrusted with the execution of the laws, which exempts the individual on whom it is bestowed from the punishment the law inflicts for a crime he has committed. It is the private though official act of the executive magistrate, delivered to the individual for whose benefit it is intended. A private deed, not communicated to him, whatever may be its character, whether a pardon or release, is totally unknown and cannot be acted on.

United States v. Wilson established that it is possible to reject a (conditional) pardon, even for a capital sentence. Burdick affirmed that the same principle extends to unconditional pardons.

A grand jury was investigating whether any Treasury Department employee was leaking information to the press. George Burdick, city editor of the New York Tribune, took the fifth and refused to reveal the source of his information. He was handed a pardon by President Woodrow Wilson but he refused to accept it or testify. He was fined $500 and jailed until he complied. The Supreme Court ruled that Burdick did not have to testify because he had the right to reject the pardon. Thus, the government did not have the ability to cause him to lose his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination through the maneuver of granting him a pardon. The Court declined to answer the question of whether the pardoning power may be exercised before conviction.

After Gerald Ford left the White House in 1977, intimates said that the former President privately justified his pardon of Richard Nixon by carrying in his wallet a portion of the text of the Burdick decision that suggested that a pardon carries an imputation of guilt and that acceptance carries a confession of guilt. Legal scholars have questioned whether that portion of Burdick is meaningful or merely dicta. Whether or not that is true, President Ford made reference to the Burdick decision in his post-pardon written statement furnished to the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives on October 17, 1974. However, Ford's reference to Burdick in his post-pardon written statement related only to the portion of Burdick that supported the proposition that the Constitution does not limit the pardon power to cases of convicted offenders or even indicted offenders.