ower to dispense with the laws, his claim to which was the principal
cause of James II's forced abdication.[129] Lastly, the term has been
held to include criminal contempts of court. Such was the holding in Ex
parte Grossman,[130] where Chief Justice Taft, speaking for the Court,
resorted once more to English conceptions as being authoritative in
construing this clause of the Constitution. Said he: "The King of
England before our Revolution, in the exercise of his prerogative, had
always exercised the power to pardon contempts of court, just as he did
ordinary crimes and misdemeanors and as he has done to the present day.
In the mind of a common law lawyer of the eighteenth century the word
pardon included within its scope the ending by the King's grace of the
punishment of such derelictions, whether it was imposed by the court
without a jury or upon indictment, for both forms of trial for contempts
were had. [Citing cases.] These cases also show that, long before our
Constitution, a distinction had been recognized at common law between
the effect of the King's pardon to wipe out the effect of a sentence for
contempt in so far as it had been imposed to punish the contemnor for
violating the dignity of the court and the King, in the public interest,
and its inefficacy to halt or interfere with the remedial part of the
court's order necessary to secure the rights of the injured suitor.
Blackstone IV, 285, 397, 398; Hawkins Pleas of the Crown, 6th Ed.
(1787), Vol. 2, 553. The same distinction, nowadays referred to as the
difference between civil and criminal contempts, is still maintained in
English law[131]." Nor was any new or special danger to be apprehended
from this view of the pardoning power. "If," says the Chief Justice, "we
could conjure up in our minds a President willing to paralyze courts by
pardoning all criminal contempts, why not a President ordering a general
jail delivery?" Indeed, he queries further, in view of the peculiarities
of procedure in contempt cases, "may it not be fairly said that in order
to avoid possible mistake, undue prejudice or needless severity, the
chance of pardon should exist at least as much in favor of a person
convicted by a judge without a jury as in favor of one convicted in a
jury trial[132]?"

EFFECTS OF A PARDON; EX PARTE GARLAND

The great leading case is Ex parte Garland[133] which was decided
shortly after the Civil War. By an act passed in 1865 Congress had
prescribed