Justice versus conscience

 

Transcript:
My boys have grown up
asking their mother,
why is it that dad gets up
in the middle of the night
and goes down to the TV room?
Because you know he
doesn’t turn the TV on.
He just sits there all night.
That’s because there are
things you can’t forget,
things you’re not
meant to forget.
You know,
people always say to me,
you know, you were brilliant.
You were a genius.
No, I was an adolescent.
And that was why
I was successful.
I was so young that I had
no fear of being caught.
I was so young that I didn’t
think about consequences.
Everything I did was
not premeditated.
Everything was done by
opportunity or by chance.
So if, in fact, I
was standing out
in front of a bank in
Manhattan with a $500 check,
there was never a plan.
I didn’t say to myself, I’m
going in, cash this check.
If they say this, I’ll do this.
If they do this, I’ll do that.
I just went in and did it.
And I felt that there was
nothing I couldn’t do.
I had tremendous
confidence in myself.
Everything I did,
I did by chance.
Everything was all these
opportunities, but always
the confidence that
I could pull it off.
And that became just from age.
But if you believe that you’re
good at what you do, and you
strive to be good
at what you do,
you don’t need to worry about
what other people think.
You need to be
able to understand
that you have your
own confidence
that you can do whatever it
is you’re required to do.
And other people will see
that confidence in you.
The minute you start
doubting yourself,
other people will see that
you are doubting yourself.
And that becomes a weakness
in your personality.
So you always want you to
be confident in everything
you do that you can do it.
You can get it done.
You’ll find a way
to get it done.
Some say, you know,
you were brilliant.
You were an absolute genius.
I was neither.
I was just a child.
Had I been brilliant,
had I been a genius,
I don’t know that
I would have found
it necessary to break the law
in order to just simply survive.
And while I know that
people are fascinated
by what I did some 50
years ago as a teenage boy,
I’ve always looked
upon what I did
as something that was
immoral, illegal, unethical,
and a burden I
live with literally
every single day of my life,
and will until my death.
There are many
who write and say,
well, you know, you
were certainly gifted.
That I was.
I was one of those
few children that
got to grow up in the
world with a daddy.
Now, the world is
full of fathers.
But there are very few men
worthy of being called daddy
by their child.
I had a daddy loved his children
more than he loved life itself.
When I was 16 years
old, I was just a child.
All 16-year-olds
are just children.
Much as we’d like them to be
adults, they’re just children.
And like all children,
they need their mother,
and they need their father.
All children need their
mother and their father.
All children are entitled to
their mother and their father.
And though it is not
popular to say so,
divorce is a very
devastating thing
for a child to
deal with and then
have to deal with the rest
of their natural life.
For me, a complete
stranger, a judge,
told me I had to choose
one parent over the other.
That was a choice a
16-year-old boy could not make.
So I ran.
How could I tell you
my life was glamorous?
I cried myself to sleep
’til I was 19 years old.
I spent every birthday,
Christmas, Mother’s Day,
Father’s Day in a
hotel room somewhere
in the world where people
didn’t speak my language.
The only people that
associated with me
were people who believed
me to be their peer,
10 years older than
I actually was.
I never got to go to a senior
prom, high school football
game, share a relationship
with someone my own age.
I always knew I’d get caught.
Only a fool would
think otherwise.
The law sometimes sleeps,
but the law never dies.
I was caught.
I went to some very bad places.
While I was sitting in that
pitch black cell in France,
my father, 57, was climbing
the subway stairs in New York
as he did every day.
He was in great physical shape.
He just happened to trip.
He reached his arm
to break his fall.
He slipped, hit his
head on the railing,
landed at the
bottom of the step.
He was dead.
I didn’t know he was dead.
I was thinking
about him, how much
I couldn’t wait to see him, hold
him, hug him, kiss him, tell
him how sorry I was.
But I never got the
opportunity to do that.
I have turned down three pardons
from three sitting presidents
of the United States
because I do not believe,
nor will I ever believe,
that a piece of paper
will excuse my actions,
that only in the end,
my actions will.
There comes a time in all of
our lifetime, we grow older.