The supplicants clustered outside the enormous closed doors. They paced the hallway, fidgeted on benches, knitted their hands and waited, waited, for their 10-minute chance at mercy.
A tall man in a sharp blazer, caught a quarter-century ago with 127 doses of LSD. A ponytailed Navy veteran who critically injured someone while driving drunk in 2008. A burly man twice convicted of assaulting his wife, now sitting beside him. A former addict once found unconscious in a car, syringe jutting from his arm. Others dogged by the past.
They had come to St. Paul on this steamy summer day to be forgiven. Restored. Redeemed.
The doors opened to reveal Minnesota officialdom personified: the governor, the attorney general and the state's chief justice — the three members of the Board of Pardons. They sat, unsmiling, at a long table facing a much smaller table that featured tissue boxes and a digital clock set at 10 minutes.
Ten minutes: the time allotted the supplicants to prove that they were worthy; that, like St. Paul, they had traveled their own rutted road to Damascus. This buzzer-beating pressure intensified a raw pardon process unlike those in most other states, with the powerless beseeching the powerful in public, and the decision rendered in the moment.
Among the powerless would be Jim Lorge, convicted in 2005 of manufacturing methamphetamine. Now a well-respected drug counselor and program director, he had been in recovery for 16 years, was engaged to be married and feared being forever defined by distant mistakes.
A pardon can mean better job and housing opportunities, the restoration of gun rights, the ability to chaperone school trips. But it can also offer something more intangible: the formal return to society's good graces.
"Do I have to carry this burden for the rest of my life?" Lorge, 48, asked before his hearing. "I want to be forgiven. I just want to be forgiven."