Federal officials should honor Gov. John Hickenlooper’s pardon of Rene Lima-Marin

Gov. John Hickenlooper’s decision to pardon Rene Lima-Marin Friday sends a clear message to federal officials now considering the muchwronged man’s deportation. We hope ICE gets that message, and joins in the effort to finally provide Lima-Marin justice, and with it freedom.

Colorado’s three branches of state government — its legislative, judicial and executive — have now spoken out in clearest terms. It is time to do right by Lima-Marin. What an insult to decency it would be to once again subject him to grave injustice as a result of cruel technicalities.

Lima-Marin is being held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials following his dramatic release from state prison earlier this week.

Because his parents brought him here from Cuba when he was 2 years old — as part of a massive refugee boatlift — his criminal conviction makes him fair game for deportation in the current crackdown mindset within the Trump administration.

Hopefully, that crackdown mindset isn’t truly at play in this drama, and ICE is simply doing its job working through the paperwork. So far, however, the signals from ICE haven’t been encouraging, and despite support for the immigrant, there is also much resistance.

Lima-Marin’s story by now is the stuff of legend.

Convicted as a teenager for a series of crimes in 2000, he was sentenced to nearly 100 years in prison. A mistake led prison staff to release him in 2008. Because he had reformed in prison and become a Christian, he became active in his church and community after his release. While he knew at the time that he had been freed on a technicality, he didn’t flee the state.

Instead, Lima-Marin married a teenage sweetheart. They worked to raise a family. When the state caught its error in 2014, LimaMarin returned to prison willingly to fight for justice by the books.

If only the law books were better able to serve his commitment to reform. For in prison he remained. Even a broad, bipartisan resolution from state lawmakers this past legislative session failed to free him.

This week, Lima-Marin’s luck began to change, for but only a handful of hours. Arapahoe County District Judge Carlos Samour ruled that his re-incarceration “would perpetuate a manifest injustice.” Samour ordered him released.

ICE then stepped in. Again, we call for justice. We supported the legislative effort to spur the governor to action. We applaud Samour’s wisdom and compassion.

We fully support the governor’s pardon now.

Under the eyes of justice, if not the rule books, the governor’s pardon should equal an exoneration worthy of erasing any technical reason to deport Lima-Marin, or even to bedevil him with an ICE monitoring program here. This is a man who no longer needs to wear an ankle bracelet or report regularly to authorities.

While he tragically and stupidly broke our laws as a young man, he has repaid his debt and worked daily to make himself a respected and contributing member of society. As a 2-year-old, he clearly had no hand in his parents’ decision to flee a country out of step with our democratic values.

Lima-Marin’s reformation, while no doubt a difficult one for some of his crime victims to accept, is the kind of outcome we should want from our penal system.

What a shame if his example met with a powerful argument that doing right matters not before the eyes of the law.