A case has occurred in Kentucky, to which reference has been already made, in which it is confidently and broadly assumed that the pardoning power under the Constitution extends even to the penalties due to informers. The following passage occurs in the opinion of the Court. "The act of 1823 says that any prosecuting attorney, who shall prosecute any person to conviction under it, shall be entitled to twenty-five per cent of the amount of such fine as shall be collected.... The act gives the prosecuting attorney one fourth of the money, when collected, but vests him with no interest in the fine or sentence, separate and distinct from that of the Commonwealth, that would screen his share from the effect of any legal operation which should, before collection, abrogate the whole or a part of it. It would require language of the strongest and most explicit character to authorize a presumption that the Legislature intended to confer any such right. We could never presume an intention to control the Governor's constitutional power to remit fines and forfeitures. _If he can in this way be restrained in the exercise of his power to remit for the fourth of a fine, so can he be for_ _the half or the whole. This part of his prerogative cannot be curtailed. With the exception of the case of treason, his power to remit fines and forfeitures, grant reprieves and pardons, is unlimited, illimitable, and uncontrollable. It has no bounds but his own discretion._ It is no doubt politic and proper for the Legislature to incite prosecuting attorneys and informers, by giving them a portion of fines, when collected; but in so doing the citizen cannot be debarred of his right of appeal to executive clemency." (_Routt_ v. _Feemster_, 7 J.J. Marshall, 132.)
According to these authorities, it seems reasonable to infer, that, under the Constitution of the United States, the pardoning power, which is clearly applicable to the offence of "transporting" slaves of the District, might remit the penalties in question. These penalties, though allotted to the owners and the county, when finally collected, are neither more nor less than the punishment, under sentence of a criminal court, for an offence of which the parties stand convicted upon indictment. They can be collected and acquitted only by the United States. No process for this purpose is at the command of the slave-owner. He had no control whatever over the prosecution at any stage, nor did it proceed at his suggestion or information. The very statute under which these public proceedings were instituted in the name of the United States secured to the slave-owner his private action on the case for damages,--thus separating the public from the private interests. These it seems the duty of the President to keep separate, except on the final collection and distribution of the penalties. Public policy and the ends of justice require that the punishment for a criminal offence should, in every case, be exclusively subject to the supreme pardoning power, without dependence upon the will of any private person. An obvious case will illustrate this. Suppose, in the case of Drayton and Sayres, it should be ascertained beyond doubt that the conviction was procured by perjury. If, by virtue of the judgment, the slave-owners have an interest in the imprisonment of these men which cannot be touched, then the prisoners, unable to meet these heavy liabilities, must continue in perpetual imprisonment, or owe their release to the accident of private good-will. The President, notwithstanding his beneficent power to pardon, under the Constitution, will be powerless to remedy this evil. But such a state of things would be monstrous; and any interpretation of the Constitution is monstrous which thus ties his hands. Mercy and justice would be rendered not merely _by halves_, but, owing to the inability of prisoners, from poverty, to pay the other half of the fine, they would be entirely arrested.