A pardon strikes the conviction from the books as if it had never occurred, and the convicted person is treated as innocent.
I’m not going to argue “benefit of the doubt” when I think the goalposts are “Should this person should be treated as innocent? As if the crime never occured?”
No. Particularly given that his rap sheet shows a pattern of violent and racist behavior, not just a one-time incident.
I mean, come on, he can’t claim that his criminal history has been an impediment to his success. His American Dream is not being ruined by the fact that he faced what seem to be fair consequences from the Justice system.
Yeah, but as far as Wahlberg ever knew (up until the victim was asked about it) he did blind the guy. It could very well be that he hit the guy hard enough that it was only the lack of an unblindable eye on that side of Trinh’s head that kept him from being blinded by Wahlberg. Doesn’t really matter in the end; it was a vicious and brutal assault. I personally hesitate to believe that we should automatically throw the book harder at an 18-year-old adult than we would at a 17-year-old minor for the same crime, especially since that age demarcation is so sharp and arbitrary. (That also applies to sexual consent, in that it’s a bit goofy that having sex with someone who is 6,570 days old can get you locked up and branded as a sexual predator, whereas waiting a week longer means you’re 100% legal and utterly inoffensive… but that’s another kettle of gummi worms.) The overall point is that nearly all of human experience occurs across a very broad spectrum and no two cases are really even remotely alike, and establishing arbitrary legal guidelines is often a fool’s errand (mandatory minimums, anyone?).
That’s what I mean: it’s absurd that a suspect who is 939 weeks old should be significantly less responsible for their dumbassery than one who is 940 weeks old… and that’s why we get certain minors being tried as adults for certain crimes that seem to be worse than your typical juvenile mischief. But it’s unworkable to have judges try to figure out appropriate sentencing with no guidelines whatsoever.
Still, I’m a big softy who’s always leaning on the side of forgiveness, redemption, and rehabilitation rather than Old-Testament punishment. Few would elect me judge.
Jesus, that’s a heartbreaking story all round. I was fairly amazed at the lengths Her Majesty’s guys went to to try to keep those two from being torn to pieces for all these years.
I agree the pardon is a bit much, and as I said upstream, if it is about the liquor license why not just have someone else own the place and he can fund it?
But in general I am sympathetic to 16 year old dumbassery not haunting you forever.
Yeah, for the most part I agree. I’m disinclined to treat violent crime as mere dumbassery, however. We all do stupid things as kids when our brains aren’t fully developed (though our bone and muscular growth may have brought us to our full adult height and weight and hitting strength by that point), but not all of us violently assault people during our dumbshit teen years.
It ain’t up to me. I didn’t go to law school, nobody ever elected me judge, and since I don’t even know anybody who knows any of the parties in this case I’m as disinterested as they come. If Trinh has forgiven Wahlberg, swell, I’m glad he can put it behind him. And yeah, the fact that Wahlberg beat someone up a quarter-century ago doesn’t really have any rational bearing on whether he should have a liquor license for his restaurant, but it happens that the current legal situation is what it is, and altering the situation to grant Wahlberg’s request will require a certain degree of effort and accommodation on the part of the legal system, and I don’t believe Wahlberg necessarily deserves such special treatment in this case. If he had made any particular effort to make amends for this transgression, then maybe an argument could be made to support his request. As things appear to stand, fuck him.
I thought it was touching the guy he beat up wanted to meet him. And you’re right, saying you are sorry is not the same as doing things to demonstrate that you are. Actions speak much louder than words.
I wasn’t sure what to think. I thought maybe enough time had passed that the memory was a tad softened, and finding out that “Hey! Dirk Diggler clobbered me back in the day!” might be a weird enough discovery that meeting him might sound… I dunno, fun or something. Kinda like finding out that the anonymous dickweed kid who stole your bike off your porch back in 1977 grew up to be Johnny Depp or something. Or it could be totally sincere.
In a couple weeks that Unbroken movie comes out, about the USC track star/Olympian Louis Zamperini who was shot down over the Pacific in 1943, survived 47 days on a raft in the Pacific, and was “rescued” by the Japanese Navy, going on to become one of the most heavily tortured American POWs of WWII (and coincidentally, my brother’s father-in-law). The movie shows pretty accurately what happened, but anyway:
Four days before his 81st birthday in January 1998, Zamperini ran a leg in the Olympic Torch relay for the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, not far from the POW camp where he had been held. While there, he attempted to meet with his chief and most brutal tormentor during the war, Mutsuhiro Watanabe, who had evaded prosecution as a war criminal, but Watanabe refused to see him.
Zamperini had forgiven him and wanted to meet him, but for whatever reason Watanabe didn’t want to fill that role in the narrative. I can’t remember if Zamperini (or Laura Hillenbrand, who wrote the Unbroken book) ever learned exactly what Watanabe’s reason for not meeting him was. I suppose it might be possible that allowing himself to be forgiven might act as a tacit acceptance that what he did during the war was genuinely wrong and evil, rather than just serving his (Watanabe’s) country, and maybe he didn’t want to do that in order to be able to sleep at night.
Who knows? I certainly don’t. But probably I’m doing a disservice to Trinh to even speculate why he might want to meet Wahlberg. For all I know, he probably genuinely has forgiven Wahlberg and really wants to communicate that fact to him.
Or maybe he wants to sucker-punch him right back. (I’m no saint; the thought would certainly occur to me.)
i tend to agree. in general i believe rights should be restored over time, but i also understand the indignation felt when a famous/rich actor asks for a pardon while so many others don’t even have the platform to ask.
as an aside, i’m glad i’m not a 16 year old these days. those ‘firework experiments’ likely would have put a serious mark on my record.
Stripped to his skivvies and a smile in a high-profile Calvin Klein advertising campaign, Wahlberg, 21, has one of the most visible bodies in the country. Last week he became the high-profile target of two New York-based antibias groups, the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation
…As part of a deal worked out between Scott and the groups, Wahlberg will film public service announcements condemning racial and homophobic violence.
…He is scheduled to appear before a judge on March 2 to answer assault charges brought by a Dorchester man whose jaw was broken during a fight last August.
In a newsletter dated later that year, GLAD writes that the decision to cancel the PSA was related to charges of a homophobic physical attack by Wahlberg against a record executive.
