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A SPECIAL SECTION:  Haiti since the January 12, 2010 Earthquake
                                                         
Posted December 19, 2005
                                       
nytlogo.gif (3067 bytes) New York Region
                                              
Paterson Rewards Redemption With a Pardon
 

By NINA BERSNSTEIN
 
Gov. David A. Paterson announced on Saturday that he had pardoned a man whose rise from poverty and street crime in Chinatown to success as an information technology executive was about to end in deportation. Related Judge Keeps His Word to Immigrant Who Kept His (February 19, 2010)

The case of the man, Qing Hong Wu, who immigrated to the United States legally as a child, had drawn support from many, including the judge who sentenced him to a reformatory in 1996 and promised to stand by him if he redeemed himself. “

"Qing Hong Wu's case proves that an individual can, with hard work and dedication, rise above past mistakes and turn his life around," Mr. Paterson said in a statement on the pardon, which will stop deportation proceedings against Mr. Wu and could open the door to American citizenship.

The governor agreed with supporters who saw the case as "the opportunity to make a forceful statement about the harsh inequity and rigidity of the immigration laws," the statement said.

Supporters and relatives were jubilant on Saturday night.

"First of all, we want to thank the governor for saving Qing Wu's life," said Elizabeth OuYang, the president OCA-NY, an Asian-American civil rights organization that led the campaign to free Mr. Wu from an immigration jail in New Jersey and keep him in the country.

"It has been an amazing rainbow of people who have come together to stop his removal in the midst of a very broken immigration system," she added.

While Mr. Wu's family and friends rejoiced, he remained in the Monmouth County Correctional Institute in Freehold, N.J., apparently unaware that his life had turned around once more.

He was taken there from immigration headquarters in Manhattan on Nov. 10. It was his application for citizenship that brought Mr. Wu, now 29, to the attention of immigration authorities almost 15 years after he committed a series of muggings with other teenagers in Lower Manhattan. In a parallel system of immigration law enforcement that makes no allowances for rehabilitation, the court hearing his case had no discretion to consider the exemplary life he had led after emerging from the reformatory.

As a "criminal alien," he was subject to mandatory detention and deportation to China, which he had left at 5 and where he knew no one.

Ms. OuYang said a full and unconditional pardon should not only prevent the federal government from deporting Mr. Wu, but should be grounds for granting him citizenship "so he can come full circle, where he started when this whole mess began."

The pardon was announced at the conclusion of a tumultuous week for Mr. Paterson in which top aides resigned and he faced calls for his resignation over accusations that he had abused the powers of his office.

Morgan Hook, a spokesman for the governor, said that "the federal government will be notified that he had been pardoned, and they will determine the next steps as far as ending the removal proceedings and releasing him."

The link between Mr. Wu and the judge who sentenced him, Michael A. Corriero, was described in an article in The New York Times last month. Mr. Wu wrote to the now-retired judge from detention reminding him of the promises that they had exchanged at his sentencing.

Judge Corriero, who had grown in the same neighborhood 40 years earlier, checked the old court transcripts and found that he had told Mr. Wu, then 16, "This is really the beginning of a new period for you."

"You will want to get a job and become a meaningful, constructive member of society to help your family." The judge then added, "I will be there to make sure you can."

The judge wrote a letter to the governor in support of a pardon, adding his testimonial to dozens of others, including Mr. Wu's employer, Centerline Capital Group, a real estate financial and management company where he was a vice president of information technology.

After the article appeared, hundreds of readers signed an online petition urging Mr. Paterson to grant a pardon.

The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., called the governor express his approval of that course.

In December, Mr. Paterson pardoned a soldier whose conviction for gun possession had prevented him from joining the New York Police Department. The soldier, Specialist Osvaldo Hernandez of Queens, had been arrested in 2002 after a pistol was found under a seat in his car.

He joined the Army after his release from prison and served 15 months in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne. After the pardon he left for another tour there.

In May 2008, the hip-hop performer Ricky Walters, who had been convicted in 1991 of attempted murder and weapons offenses, was pardoned by the governor. Mr. Walters, known as Slick Rick, had also faced deportation, to Great Britain, because of his criminal record.

In Mr. Wu's case, deportation would never have been an issue if his widowed mother, Floren Wu-Li, had been able to secure citizenship while her son was still a minor. But she became a citizen only four years ago, when she was allowed to take the test in Chinese.

She blamed herself, and no one was happier about the news Saturday night. "It's like a miracle," she told her daughter Jenny Gong.

But to Judge Corriero, the governor's pardon represented more than one family's happy ending. "I'm ecstatic," he said. "It restores my faith in the system, and it is the beginning of the recognition that young people should be permitted to recover from their mistakes."

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. Reprinted from The New York Times, National, of March 6, 2010
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