Headline : Ask Jordan: Does accepting a pardon mean admitting guilt?

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“If President Biden were to grant pardons to Trump’s opponents who are likely to be targets of his new compliant Department of Justice, would their acceptance of the pardons constitute an admission of guilt?”

In 1915’s Burdick v. United States, the Supreme Court said that a pardon “carries an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it.” At first glance, that language would seem to answer your question in the affirmative. But the question in Burdick wasn’t whether accepting a pardon means admitting guilt. Instead, that appeal asked whether a person could turn down a pardon (the high court’s answer was “yes”).

The court’s observation about guilt in Burdick is known as “dicta” — meaning language that’s unnecessary to an opinion — as opposed to the case’s “holding,” which announces the binding rule for the future in our common law system of precedent. At least, a federal appeals court said so a few years back when it rejected a broad reading of that Burdick language and said that “not every acceptance of a pardon constitutes a confession of guilt.” Of course, whether opinion language counts as dicta or binding law can be the subject of litigation — as we saw in Trump’s classified documents case — and we don’t know what the Supreme Court would say if the issue were presented to the justices today.

But even putting precedent aside, there’s a common-sense reason that accepting a pardon doesn’t automatically admit guilt. That’s because pardons can be issued for different reasons. Sometimes, they’re granted after a person was clearly guilty and then rehabilitated themselves and the like. However, a president might also think that someone is innocent. So it’s difficult to see how accepting a pardon would amount to a confession in all circumstances. The innocence distinction alone suggests a case-by-case evaluation is warranted.

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