Unforgettable mistake

In today's WSJ there's a story, The High Bar For Redemption ,about one man who has been convicted before and is fighting to get into New York state bar. Here is the excerpt from WSJ:

The Issue: A twice convicted felon completed law school after serving time in prison, but has been denied admission to the New York bar nine times by state justices.
The Dilemma: What counts as redemption and who gets to decide?
The Bottom Line: Bar admission standards vary from state to state, and within states are often subjective.

Actually he has already been admitted to join New Jersey bar, but still fighting for his position in New York. What made me interested is the following sentence from the article:

"Last month, Mr. Wiesner formally asked the Manhattan federal court not to revoke his admission there. His emotion-packed pleading quoted author William Faulkner: "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past."

What reminds me from this, is the other report from WSJ last weekend, The Weekend Interview, with Nobel laureate Myron Scholes who is famous for his hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), which went belly-up in the late 1990s. He said following words in this interview, which implies pretty much the same thing as above lawyer:

...He says he feels like the woman in the local paper who, whatever she does, will always be remembered for one thing: "Mrs. Jones, who was falsely accused of the ax murder of her husband in 1944, recently had a garden party for 10 of her friends."...

Maybe we should be more careful on every step since people seems not that easy to forget at all...