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Fine, I'll concede the point that a handful of specific individuals have gained. But literally everyone else gained nothing, and in fact is losing by this. So this is still by far a net loss even if a handful of people gained significantly. Your rebuttal "but some people have gained" makes it come off even worse if anything, because now it's hurting the vast majority just to benefit a token few.
Better 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man should be imprisoned falsely.
A severe injustice has been overturned. The world is a little bit brighter, freer, and more just.
It saddens me that you can't see this.
I am filled with joy for the political prisoners and their families who were railroaded by a weaponized legal system. Those who perpetrated and defended this monstrosity ought to be jailed for at least as long as those now freed.
You make a persuasive point that we should err on the side of protecting innocents. I myself am a strong believer in Blackstone's formulation. On the other hand, I don't think that it's accurate to say that what Trump has done here is motivated by that same desire. If it were, then he would've been more selective about who he pardoned. After all, this isn't an "all or nothing" where we can't do anything about the fact that the guilty (and there are guilty people here) will be set free.
No, in my view this is pure "stick it to them" trying to get back at his outgroup coupled with a healthy dose of not caring whether the presidential pardon power is being abused. And that is not acceptable. We all lose by such an action, and we lose quite a bit at that. So, at best, this is some benefit to those who are innocent coupled with serious damage to the social fabric of the United States. I'm not prepared to accept that trade so readily as you are.
Trump's motivations are irrelevant when assessing the rightness of the act itself. The right thing for the wrong reason is still the right thing, even if Trump himself gets not moral credit. As to that, if the choice were all or nothing I would very much prefer the outcome we have just had. And I do think the choice was much more all or nothing than it wasn't. As soon as you start picking and choosing, it opens an avenue of attack. "Why this particular person and not this particular person? Why clemency for this but not that?" And this attack will be leveraged to the hilt as many times as it can be since, after all, the attackers are absolutely politically motivated. They were willing to put people in jail for decades for low-level hooliganism or even just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why wouldn't they make hay?
There is also his own base to consider. Political capital is not an unlimited resource. Even Elon had to walk back his H1B stance on his own website. A significant part of Trump's base would see anything that wasn't a blanket pardon as a betrayal.
A blanket pardon is far harder to nitpick.
I also think that the protests were legitimate and the worst excesses (which still hit nowhere near the level of a typical Floyd demonstration) were intentionally allowed or even encouraged, both in the police/NG response or lack thereof and in some cases with literal plants acting as agent provocateurs. In any event, it infuriated me to know I lived in a country where sitting in someone's chair and smoking a joint got the full force of the federal government on you finding every possible way to charge you for as much as possible, while literally burning down entire city blocks killing dozens and causing billions of damage and possibly decades of urban blight was met with a, "I mean what are we gonna do, send in the National Guard (lol how ridic can you imagine that would be like totally fascism. fascism is when you shoot people burning down your cities don't you know?)."
Now we are slightly less living in that country. Hopefully the trend continues.
Forgive me for the facebook link, but my view is basically this https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1120248821680811 I don't think anyone should be able to break the law just because they are protesting. But I also think that a law that is applied unevenly, and wielded as a political bludgeon, is not only no longer serving its rightful purpose but serving an incredibly destructive one instead. It would be better for it to go unenforced entirely than for it to be used in such a way.
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But how can Trump really know who's innocent or not? The premise here is that the court that convicted all of them was politically compromised, and it's probably not a good idea for Trump to sit as judge and jury.
I like the analogy of someone convicted due to the fruit of an illegal search -- yes, he is probably guilty; no, that does not mean that it's an injustice for him to be turned loose. It means that the justice system needs to do better next time.
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