There are sentences a governor should never need help avoiding.
Gov. Tim Walz found one anyway.
While defending his decision to pardon a man convicted of repeatedly sexually assaulting a child, Walz asked whether Americans believe “we can’t all be judged by our worst day.”
Walz never uttered the headline’s exact wording.
He chose a softer formulation with the same moral problem: a child molester’s crime should cease to define the judgment society makes about him.
Except the record describes years of abuse, several assaults and a victim who was only 10 years old when it began.
Calling that a “worst day” is an insult to the child who endured it.
Watch Walz make the argument in his own words:
A KTTC local report places the remark at Walz’s first public response to the uproar over the June pardon of Tou Lue Vang and his subsequent deportation to Laos.
Walz asked whether removing Vang made anyone safer, whether it made the children left behind more stable and whether it improved the principle that people should avoid being judged by their worst day.
He then acknowledged that the underlying offenses were “horrific crimes,” a concession that makes his choice of mercy language even harder to understand rather than softening it.
Vang had already admitted during the June 10 pardon meeting that his conduct was wrong, that it was a serious crime and that his victim was a child.
That exchange reveals the whole problem.
Walz knew exactly what he was discussing.
He knew the victim was a child, knew the crime was horrific and still presented the convicted offender as a man being judged too harshly for his “worst day.”
Yet this case was never about an isolated day.
Fox News examined the clemency records and found that the abuse occurred between 2002 and 2004, beginning when Vang was 18 and the girl was 10.
The records describe four to six sexual assaults, including one in which Vang offered the child $10 to stay quiet, before his 2006 conviction for first-degree criminal sexual conduct.
His 12-year prison term was stayed, leaving him with 30 years of supervised probation and one year of local confinement, of which he served roughly eight months.
At the time of his arrest, the records say Vang minimized the crime as a “minor thing,” invoked cultural customs and argued that the child shared blame for what he had done. His later pardon application expressed shame and regret, a sharp reversal from the position recorded after his arrest.
Those facts dismantle the “worst day” framing.
A bad day is an impulsive outburst, a reckless choice or a terrible mistake.
Repeatedly preying on a child across a span of years is a pattern of deliberate conduct.
Redemption can be real, remorse can grow and forgiveness can carry immense power.
None of those ideas requires the government to pretend the defining facts disappeared.
The second video shows the same exchange from a wider angle:
The official Minnesota Board of Pardons agenda identifies Vang’s offense as first-degree criminal sexual conduct, records a February 16, 2006 conviction date and places the case in Ramsey County.
Minnesota’s board has three members: the governor, the attorney general and the chief justice of the state Supreme Court, each carrying direct responsibility for the clemency decision.
Walz joined Attorney General Keith Ellison and Chief Justice Natalie Hudson in approving the pardon after the Clemency Review Commission had recommended it by a 4-2 vote.
The commission weighs rehabilitation, remorse, criminal history, responsibility and the seriousness of the offense, while the Board of Pardons makes the final decision and controls whether mercy becomes state action. The state record places this choice squarely inside Minnesota’s formal clemency system.
The victim reportedly supported Vang’s pardon and said she had forgiven him.
Her forgiveness deserves respect because it belongs to her.
It never creates a duty for the public to erase the offense, for Minnesota to award clemency or for federal authorities to abandon immigration enforcement.
Private forgiveness and public judgment serve different purposes.
One can release a victim from the burden of hatred; the other protects the standards a society places around its children.
The White House said President Trump’s administration removed Vang after Secretary of State Marco Rubio terminated the legal status that had allowed him to remain in the United States.
Federal authorities said an immigration judge had ordered Vang removed in 2006 and described the Minnesota pardon as an attempt to help a convicted child sex offender avoid deportation.
The pardon failed to erase federal immigration authority, and Vang was deported to Laos during the week before Walz delivered his “worst day” defense.
Walz argued that the removal left six children without their father and questioned whether the deportation improved public safety or stability for the family he left behind. The administration framed the removal as a direct reversal of Minnesota’s clemency decision.
Those children face a painful reality, and they bear zero responsibility for their father’s crime.
That sorrow still cannot shift the moral center of the case away from the girl he abused.
Government exists to draw lines.
One of the clearest should be that a man convicted of repeatedly assaulting a 10-year-old receives no special claim to remain in the United States because he later built a family and rehabilitated his life.
Mercy can recognize the years that followed without rewriting the years that came first.
Walz wanted the public to ask whether Vang’s deportation made America safer.
The answer is simpler than his speech suggested.
Removing a foreign national convicted of first-degree criminal sexual conduct against a child is a legitimate exercise of both public safety and national sovereignty.
A governor can believe in redemption without scolding the public for remembering the crime.
Tim Walz chose a child rapist as the face of mercy, then reduced repeated abuse to one man’s “worst day.”
That sentence tells voters far more about the governor than it does about forgiveness.
https://wltreport.com/2026/07/16/tim-walz-child-molesters-worst-day-pardon/
No comments:
Post a Comment