Amnesty

An act of the state declaring that a class of offences will not be prosecuted. It is worth keeping apart from its neighbours. An acquittal is a finding after evidence. A pardon follows a conviction. An amnesty stops the process before either exists, which means it also stops the record that the process would have produced.

That second effect is why the term matters to this course. The amnesty of January 1948 did not decide whether the Philippine wartime elite had betrayed the country. It decided that the question would not be answered, and the evidence that would have named the mechanism went unheard with it.

Source: Used here in its ordinary legal sense rather than as a course coinage. The Philippine instance that fixes it is the general amnesty issued by President Manuel Roxas on 28 January 1948, covering Philippine collaborators and excluding only those charged with ordinary crimes such as murder or rape, which ended José P. Laurel’s trial on 132 counts of treason before the People’s Court without a verdict. Compiled record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_P._Laurel .

First used in: 1.5 · Ruin, and the pardon nobody voted for