Pardons Help 3 Men Get Right With the World

Be it known that the list of who’s naughty no longer includes one Kenneth F. Copley, who many years ago tried raising pocket money by cooking bootleg whiskey in the Tennessee woods.

Also forgiven is Olgen Williams, a former postal clerk in Indianapolis who filched $10.90 from the mail in the 1970s to support a heroin habit. Cleared too is Harlan Dobas, who 40 years ago scooped excess grain from the Portland, Ore., docks where he worked and sold it without paying taxes.

“I did wrong,” Dobas said Tuesday. “It’s a bad thing. It’s followed me all my life.”

All three men long ago paid their debts to society for misdeeds that, in retrospect, seem almost quaint. Yet there are times when a man can settle his account, hew to the straight and narrow and still not be 100% right with the world.

Copley made such a discovery when he was turned down for a handgun license in Lyles, Tenn., four years ago. The reason: He was a felon. Dobas was told he had risen as far as he was going to in the Oregon state militia until he got his old offense scrubbed for good. Williams, who left the drugs far in his past and now is a respected community leader and close friend of the Indianapolis police chief, sought one final step in his redemption.

In all three cases, there was but one place to turn: the president of the United States.

And on Monday, the White House answered their pleas, announcing that seven people nationwide -- including Copley, Dobas and Williams -- had been granted pardons by President Bush, the first of his administration. With a swipe of his pen, the president made clean the criminal records of a group of ordinary people who for the most part now look back on their transgressions as spasms of youthful foolishness.

“What all these cases have in common is that each pardon recipient committed a relatively minor offense many years ago, completed his prison sentence or probation and paid any fine, and has gone on to live an exemplary life and to be a positive force in his community,” said a White House spokeswoman.

Among those pardoned was a Mississippi man who got three years’ probation and paid a $500 fine in 1993 for altering an odometer. (He declined comment.) Another recipient -- an Iowa resident fined $15,000 in 1989 for making a false statement to the Social Security Administration about his employment -- called the pardon a “nice Christmas present.”

The pardons served needs that were practical and deeply personal.

“God has forgiven me. My family loves me. My community supports me. I felt it was something I wanted personally,” said Williams, 54, who spent six months in federal prison after his 1972 theft conviction and now runs a community services center in a working-class section of Indianapolis. “I wanted the whole gamut -- from God’s forgiveness all the way to the people who incarcerated me.”

Williams helps ex-convicts find jobs and tries to steer teens clear of trouble. His unhappy brush with the law came after he returned from the Vietnam War, “disillusioned, full of hatred.” He clambered up the ladder of intoxicants, from marijuana to LSD and heroin, and soon noticed that people were stupid enough to send cash in the mail. When he finally got caught stealing, it was during a sting set up by postal inspectors who had been tipped off.

His marriage dissolved, but Williams married again and now has 10 children. He is devoutly religious and a “law-and-order man,” Williams said by telephone. “I did wrong 30 years ago. I was the villain, not the police.”

Williams filled out an 18-page pardon application three years ago, but assumed he’d been rejected until the call came from a Justice Department lawyer.

The pardon will enable Copley, a 61-year-old crane operator, to vote once again and go hunting for wild turkey in the countryside around his central Tennessee home after he retires next spring.

Copley said he had voted until 1998, when he discovered the liquor conviction was still on his record as a felony. Felons are ineligible to vote or to carry weapons. He decided to seek a pardon in 1998 and hired a lawyer to help.

The bootlegging offense seemed minor, and it surprised Copley that it continued to follow him so long after the 1962 incident, for which he served two years’ probation. Copley was 21 at the time. He and a friend were tending a backwoods still for the owner when federal agents surprised them. Jobs were scarce and lots of people resorted to making whiskey. Copley, with a ninth-grade education, had no job and dim prospects.

“Life was rough at that time,” he said. “If I could have done anything else, I wouldn’t have done that.”

Dobas is hoping that, now pardoned, he can reach the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Oregon State Defense Force. He is 77 years old now. The three months spent in a federal prison after his conspiracy conviction in 1966 seem part of some other person’s life.

He broke the law while working as a supervisor for a grain company. The product would spill off the rail boxcars or pile up inside the walls and some of the workers, including Dobas, scooped it up and sold it, he said. Over a four-year period, he should have paid $12,000 in taxes on the earnings, but did not. He lost his job and had to sell his house to pay the government what he owed.

“The lesson is, pay your taxes,” Dobas said.

Dobas still has not received the official pardon document. But once it is in his hands, he said, he will feel like a college student grasping a sheepskin.

“Then,” he said, “it’ll sink in.”