Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
View Point
I never thought I'd see the day when Ben Cayetano would be publicly criticized in the press for going too easy on anyone. That has certainly not been listed as one of his faults before now. Tom Foley has
paid his debt and
deserves forgivenessAnyone who knows the governor also knows that he holds himself and others to very high standards. It takes that tough, exacting and judicious a person to grant a pardon to a criminal. If not really called for, Cayetano would never pardon anyone.
I thought that his pardoning of Tom Foley was one of the finest, most decent things that the governor has ever done, and I was very proud of him for doing it.
It takes a man of great courage and quality to step in and remove society's boot from the neck of some poor miscreant. But the mob just hates it when that happens.
In every way, Foley had been a leader in Hawaii's legal community, a paragon of all of our community values except one. Drinking took control of his life and caused him to kill another person in a car crash.
It wasn't his first drunk driving episode. But this time, because of Foley, another person lost everything he had, including his life, and Foley's act of driving his car into Ho Pin Tsai's vehicle caused Foley to lose everything that he had, except his life.
The consequences were cruel all around -- on both their families.
Everybody lost. And because Foley was a prominent citizen, the media, courts and the penal system were especially hard on him. He actually did more and harder time because of his prominence, and I don't mean figuratively or metaphorically.
The system made him pay in many mean and special ways while he did his time in the toughest prison we have.
Given his background and lack of any other criminality in his entire life, it would have been utterly defensible to place him in a minimum security institution to serve his time. Yet he went to Halawa. The Big House.
Every day, in every way, he was made to pay. The members of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and others say that he got special treatment. He did, and you wouldn't like it.
Through it all, Foley paid his debt to society like the good man he is, and took his punishment, one hard day at a time. So, on behalf of you and me, after Foley paid with all he had, Governor Cayetano forgave him.
True, Ho Pin Tsai doesn't get his life back. But Tom Foley's career is ruined and his life has been wrecked. He has served his time and fully repented, but his life as he knew it is gone.
Mrs. Ho says that she forgives Foley and wants him to get on with living, and by agreeing with her, our governor instills a little hope, a little redemption, a little mercy into our community life.
A little mercy is OK.
Folks, we all have to face up to the fact that if we are going to take the approach that there can be no redemption for the wrongs that we flawed humans all too often do, then we and our society are doomed.
John Radcliffe is associate director of the University of Hawaii Professional Assembly.