I can. Let’s say for example that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was used to prosecute you for downloading JSTOR documents which you had already access to. And you are facing the cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, personal asset forfeiture. Now, would a pardon from the highest executive office be a miscarriage when the prosecution should never have happened in the first place? I don’t think so, I don’t think all laws are neutral (eg Patriot Act) or all prosecutions are equally valid, therefore a pardon may indeed be a way to tipping the scales to a more fair society.

That said, I have never seen the current administration do that.

I agree with the example given in the sibling comment, and this is why the framers believed there needed to be a final “safety valve” outside the courts. Legal systems are imperfect, and sometimes a pardon is the only practical way to remedy an egregious error.

Another example where pardons might be useful is when laws are changed after sentencing. If the new law does not provide for retroactive adjustments, a president or governor can grant clemency in order to correct disparities in sentencing outcomes.

Take a look at the list of people pardoned by any president except the current one. Most (but not all) of the pardons are to correct clear miscarriages of justice.

Pardons are useful in a single specific way. As the laws cannot be changed retroactively (this would be against the principles of democracy), you need something to handle the case where a law was too strict or too dumb and is rescinded. In my country, pardons are mostly issued by judges, and presidential pardons are also reviewed by judges (and always transformed into 'commutation of sentence' instead of full pardon, so that the person is still guilty)

It’s your politicians who are crooked beyond belief, and have been for a long time.

In the early 90s, Jean Chrétien was caught on a hot mike incident decrying that American politicians make sure that every vote they give has a local benefit for them. He was right to be incredulous that there is no party line in American politics; the only safety against pure cronyism is morals.

US politicians were appalled and reportedly threatened Chrétien with supporting the Québec separatists. He was never caught complaining again.

All that to say that Trump is the end result of the long tumble of US politics. Unless you rewrite your constitution I consider you guys toast. You’ll lose democracy in my lifetime.

A finite set of symbols (laws) can never express everything a reasonable person would want to be allowed to happen in the world.

There are hundreds of years of examples of it being used. How closely did you actually go through them before deciding that it's literally impossible for it to ever result in a just outcome?

Local cops/AG persecuting groups they don’t like

There's always going to be miscarriages of justice and laws which are morally wrong.

e.g. Alan Turing being prosecuted for homosexuality.

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For some reason, he acts as if environmental crimes of any kind are not real. In effect he goes so far as to strongly encourage them.

Why couldn't it have been penetrated with policy?

As you note, Europe did this quite successfully with successively-tighter diesel emissions standards for new vehicles being introduced every few years since 1992. Other countries - China, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Indonesia, Australia, etc - have either adopted the Euro standards wholesale or tweaked them slightly for their local market conditions.

That was backed up by measures such as testing individual vehicles for continued compliance at their annual inspections, banning commercial vehicles that fail to meet recent standards from using public roads, charging private vehicles which fail to meet recent standards when they enter dense urban areas, and scrappage schemes to mop up the remaining non-compliant vehicles.

It took a while to produce results, but eventually resulted in pretty dramatic improvements in air quality - and we now have good evidence of improved health outcomes, particularly in children with asthma or other respiratory conditions.

Perhaps too late for the US to start now given the switch to EVs, but it ought to be kept in mind for the next time a "we can't possibly do anything about this" issue comes up.

> The problem with all of this is that there is this entire niche of the market that you simply cannot penetrate with policy.

I don't really understand how the rest of your comment provides evidence for this claim. Not wanting to address it with policy, sure, I can see you seem to feel that way, but it's not clear why you're convinced it can't be addressed.

>get you sent straight to jail in Europe

I'm in the UK and no one goes to jail but it's more expensive tax wise to run the more polluting ones. As a result you don't see many.

Sarcasm, presumably, but unless they're caught rolling coal[1] again, they can't be re-arrested as they've been pardoned for the previous cases. It's a tacky crime, hardly the most serious, but that makes a presidential pardon seem especially absurd here.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal

Ergo, you're a crook, just not big enough to be jailed for it.

What's wrong with just using gasoline (not diesel)? These days there even exist EV trucks.