I really don’t think giving the head of state the power to pardon is a very good idea. I used to be totally baffled how it was a thing at all but the rationale has since been explained to me. While I sorta get it, the theoretical benefit is far outweighed by the inevitable grimy reality. Like others, probably mostly because of my own biases, I find it hard to summon a great deal of outrage about this understandable if blatantly hypocritical move after so much prior abuse of the lower had already occurred, but frankly if the option weren’t even there then nobody would even need to talk about this. If the justice system of the nation is supposedly well designed and theoretically trustworthy then there isn’t the need to have the ability for it to be arbitrarily overrulled in a manner that operates very much like the monarchical tyrants the United States was supposedly foundationally opposed to.
I remember around 2005ish, maybe earlier, there was a company that started selling Duff beer here in Australia with the same font as from the Simpsons and a complete clone of the cartoon can design. Everyone thought it was cool and it became very popular very quickly. People were surprised that The Simpsons name would attach itself to a real life beer given it was a family show and this would be ripe for controversy. It came to light after only a couple of months that The Simpsons brand had nothing to do with it and the company had somehow managed to go through all the steps of bringing this to market and just presumably hoped they wouldn’t get in to trouble. They were very quickly made to stop distributing those beers. Weird situation.