Taranto: She Accidentally Shot Him on Purpose

James Taranto

An editorial in the Portland Oregonian begins by retelling this sad story:

In 1963, a 17-year-old named Laura Welch was driving the family car with a friend when she sailed through a stop sign and rammed into a car driven by another teenager. The other driver, Michael Gordon, was a high school classmate and a good friend of Welch's. His neck was broken in the crash, and he died at the scene.

Welch was not charged with vehicular manslaughter, as she might have been in another time or place. Still, she had caused a death, and it felt "like the end of the world," Welch's friend later said. Welch had to find a way to go on, and she did. Today she is better known as a school librarian, mother of twins and the wife of President Bush.

The editorial isn't about Mrs. Bush, but about Kieya Walker, née Lori Lynn Hissner, who, as the Oregonian reported in a Sunday news story, works as a "classroom assistant" in a Portland elementary school. A controversy has arisen because of Hissner's past, which the Oregonian likens to Mrs. Bush's. Here is her story, as recounted on Sunday:

Kieya Walker had once been Lori Lynn Hissner, who, in 1988 at age 18 shot and killed her boyfriend, Robert Allen Pomerinke, as he slept. Convicted in Astoria of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years in prison, Hissner served four years and five months before being paroled. She changed her name, married, moved to Portland and had two sons.

Under Oregon law, no one can work in a school who has been convicted of any of 38 crimes. Murder is among them, manslaughter not. The Oregonian thinks Hissner/Walker should keep her job:

Like many other people, Walker is a different person today, at 36, than she was half a lifetime ago at 18. It would be a terrible waste if her younger self were permitted to eclipse her maturity, and the good she can still do to repay her debt to society.

It may well be that she has reformed--but the Oregonian would have a stronger case if it didn't rest on a false analogy between a terrible accident and a deliberate act of homicide.