Bill Richardson Hesistating On Pardoning Billy The Kid

I'm sure it looks like a pardon would be a media event winner, which no doubt attracts Bill Richardson like a light attracts moths, but pardoning Billy the Kid is a bad idea. Billy the Kid had his appealing qualities, and even had a heyday as a genuine hero for the Hispanic population during New Mexico's Lincoln County War, but he was also, at times and places, a vicious killer. He killed jailers in the line of official duty. He even provoked a drunk braggart (who didn't know who he was talking to) into saying he'd challenge Billy the Kid to a duel. The Kid then surreptitiously stole the fellow's gun and emptied it of bullets - then he unmasked himself as Billy the Kid and challenged the hapless fellow to a duel. I mean, that's just cruel....:

Time is running out for pardoning New Mexico's most famous outlaw, despite a continuing campaign by people who think he's a relative or at least a kindred spirit.

Early in his first term, Gov. Bill Richardson hinted he was looking into posthumously pardoning William H. Bonney, also known as Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim or "Billy the Kid."

...But with less than two months left in his second and final term, Richardson "has yet to decide whether he's even going to proceed with a review of the Billy the Kid issue," gubernatorial spokesman Eric Witt said recently. "He still has not come to a decision which direction if any he wants to go on this thing."

...The main argument Billy the Kid fans use to justify a posthumous pardon is that territorial Gov. Wallace, the Union general who wrote the novel Ben Hur while living in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, promised one to him. But William Wallace, the former governor's great-grandson, who lives in Westport, Conn., recently said there is no historical evidence of that.

The story of the promised pardon apparently stems from a letter Billy the Kid wrote to Wallace from the Santa Fe jail on March 2, 1881, imploring him to walk over to visit him in his cell, minutes away, and offering to testify about a murder if Wallace would "annul" murder indictments against him for killings during the Lincoln County War. "I have no wish to fight anymore," Bonney wrote in the letter now in the collection of the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library. "Indeed I have not raised an arm since your proclamation of 1878 demanding that hostilities cease in the Lincoln County War."

But the next month, a judge in Mesilla sentenced Bonney to hang for killing a deputy. On April 28, 1881, while awaiting execution in Lincoln, Bonney escaped by killing two deputies with a pistol believed to have been left for him in a privy. By the end of May, Wallace had left New Mexico to accept an appointment as minister to the court of the Turkish sultan, without ever acting on the pardon.

Six weeks later, on July 14, 1881, Sheriff Garrett shot down Bonney in a dark bedroom of the residence of Peter Maxwell, son of land baron Lucien Maxwell, near Fort Sumner.

When the pardon was proposed in 2001, then-Gov. Gary Johnson, Richardson's predecessor, quickly announced he would not consider a pardon. That was partly based on an analysis of the situation by Charles Bennett, a historian and former deputy director of the state History Museum.

"By the end of Billy the Kid's life he had performed other misdeeds beyond those committed at the time of his discussion with Gov. Wallace, and most likely knew he was no longer in a position to expect a pardon or exemption from prosecution," Bennett wrote. "While it is accepted that the myth and image of Billy the Kid embodies youth, nobility, humanity, romance, and tragedy, he was, in the final analysis, a killer and an outlaw, though hardly on the scale represented by the legend that grew around him."