Pardon
Winters' son James, along with his close childhood friend Frank Jimenez, began campaigning for his father's pardon after his death, receiving the support of, among others, 21 Congressmen, the American Jewish Committee, and Steven Spielberg. President Bush officially pardoned Winters on December 23, 2008. Democratic Representative Ron Klein, who led the congressional group, commented that "President Bush made the right decision today to issue a posthumous pardon to Charles Winters, a Florida resident who played an essential role in the creation of the state of Israel."
Winter's lawyer, Wilmer Hale partner Reginald Brown, stated, "He did a heroic thing and, at the time, the law didn’t reflect our values. The pardon is a way of the law catching up with the history." His son James responded to the pardon, saying, "This is a present for my father...It was a monumental challenge, but my dad used to always say ‘Keep the faith,’ and we did". Winters' pardon constituted the first posthumous pardon since Henry Ossian Flipper in 1999.
Read more about this topic: Charles Winters
Famous quotes containing the word pardon:
“The man that hails you Tom or Jack,
And proves by thumps upon your back
How he esteems your merit,
Is such a friend, that one had need
Be very much his friend indeed
To pardon or to bear it.”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)
“A beautiful person among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods; and we can pardon pride, when a woman possesses such a figure that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)