Osler's Razor

The supplicants clustered outside the enormous closed doors. They paced the hallway, fidgeted on benches, knitted their hands and waited, waited, for their 10-minute chance at mercy.

A tall man in a sharp blazer, caught a quarter-century ago with 127 doses of LSD. A pony-tailed Navy veteran who critically injured someone while driving drunk in 2008. A burly man twice convicted of assaulting his wife, now sitting beside him. A former addict once found unconscious in a car, syringe jutting from his arm. Others dogged by the past.

They had come to the Minnesota capital of St. Paul on this steamy summer day to be forgiven. Restored. Redeemed...

Ten minutes: the time allotted the supplicants to prove that they were worthy; that, like St. Paul, they had traveled their own rutted road to Damascus...

No one can expect mercy. No one has the right to be forgiven. Pardons live beyond the parameters of the criminal code’s black-and-white text. They are, by nature, extraordinary.

Rooted in part in the ancient doctrine that monarchs derive power directly from God, pardons are a discretionary tool often given to the executive branch — the president and the governor — to override court-ordered sanctions: to shorten a prison sentence, restore civil rights or eliminate the obligation to identify oneself as a felon...

“Mercy is a requirement for justice, given how punishment actually operates in the world,” said Rachel Barkow, a New York University law professor who specializes in clemency law. “For us to assume there’s a concept of perfect justice, it means we would know how a person will evolve and change over time.”

But with the 2020 murder of a Black man, George Floyd, by a white Minneapolis police officer fresh in memory, advocates for criminal justice reform seized the moment when the like-minded Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party swept the governor’s office, the House of Representatives and the Senate in last November’s elections. By springtime, Mr. Walz had signed laws transforming how the state treated people with criminal records, including shortened probation for most felonies, an easier process for expunging the records of certain crimes and, beginning next year, changing the pardon process to make clemency more accessible.

This way, more people can “live where they want to, work where they want to, go hunting with their kids and grandkids,” said Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis who helped draft the legislation. “But there’s also the reconciliation between society and that individual. There’s the mercy, the forgiveness and the wholeness that comes from that.”

...

Now, at the church service, a reflection of those days appeared on a large screen that moments earlier had featured the lyrics of hymns: a triptych of Mr. Lorge’s dead-eyed mug shots.

“That guy doesn’t exist,” he said. “But I’ll never forget that guy.”

A prayer leader summoned all the “men of God” in the room to come forward. Soon a dozen of them — one with a white beard, another wearing a backward baseball cap — were placing hands on the back and shoulders of Mr. Lorge, who closed his eyes.

“What time is your — is it Wednesday?” the leader asked.

“Wednesday,” Mr. Lorge answered.

With bowed head, the leader prayed that though the man before them was redeemed in the eyes of God, with the Lord’s help he would also be pardoned by “the earthly governors and authorities.”

...

At this moment the large, bald man from Minnesota, wearing a blue blazer, lavender shirt and patterned tie bought at discount, joined a pursuit that reached back through American history to the beginnings of humankind.

Before George Washington issued the first presidential pardons in 1795, to men implicated in the Whiskey Rebellion. Before King Ine of Wessex exercised his “prerogative of mercy” during his medieval reign. Before Clementia, goddess of mercy, appeared on Roman coins. Back to the earliest clans recognizing that harmonious community required forgiveness...

Sitting at a long mahogany table, the governor would recount certain moments from the last two days, moments of joy and of pain. He and his two board colleagues had granted 17 pardon requests, denied three others and left the three other imprisoned supplicants with some measure of relief. They had granted mercy and withheld mercy.

He would recall attending a Joan Osborne concert years ago at a women’s prison with his wife, Gwen, a prison education advocate, and how moved he had been by hearing the incarcerated crowd join in singing the musician’s anthem, “One of Us.” He would even recite part of the chorus:

What if God was one of us

Just a slob like one of us

“Amen.”