News item: Pittsburgh's Department of Public Works is ready to fire six workers, accusing them of lying on job applications by denying past felony convictions.

The story said one of those on the chopping block is a sweeper operator who has been working for the city for 20 years. Another is a laborer who has been working for a decade. Another is my neighbor.

He pleaded guilty to a passel of drug charges in 1996, the year before I met him. I hadn't known that.

I put down the paper, told my wife about it, got dressed and walked down the block to Rick Shiloh's house and knocked on his door. Nobody answered. So I wrote Rick a note saying that, if he needed someone to vouch for his trustworthiness, honesty and workmanship, my wife and I would be happy to oblige.

Here's why:

We moved to our street in the summer of 1997, buying a three-story, 19th-century fixer-upper with no finished rooms. I am Mr. Badwrench and a graduate of the Moe, Larry and Curly School of House Painting, so setting up our home for the family we planned required a small army of tradesmen to troop through.

The painting job required sanding about a football field's length of floor and ceiling moldings, which had been shelved in the unfinished cellar. The first painter we hired worked more slowly than evolution.

Eventually, we turned to our neighbor, Rick. My wife is management and I'm labor, so it was probably her idea, and it turned out to be a great one.

We gave Rick a key. He painted our family room, the bathrooms, the parlor, the hallways and the children's rooms. He painted on all three floors. He was very good at his craft, always on time, and stuck to the prices he quoted. He'd work when we weren't there, and he even helped my wife find less expensive ways to do things.

Rick went well beyond the job description, and his wife gave our younger daughter a stuffed purple bear she still cherishes. We had Rick keep a house key long after the job was done, in case one of us ever locked ourselves out of our house, which happened a time or two in the past dozen years.

Rick, 52, still lives in the house in which he grew up, with his wife and their 23-year-old daughter. After he read my note Tuesday morning, Rick called me, and that afternoon we sat on his back porch and talked.

He obtained prescription painkillers fraudulently in 1996 from a crooked Westmoreland County pharmacist. He was sentenced to two years probation. When he applied for work at the city in 2001, the Allegheny County Clerk of Courts checked the files and found only a driving-under-the-influence charge in 1986, which was handled through Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition. The county found no felony.

Rick decided not to bring it up. The city says he went further, checking "no" when he was asked if he was convicted of a felony.

The irony is the conviction itself might not have disqualified Rick. The city looks at the seriousness of a crime, how recent it was, and whether it is job-related. Mayor Luke Ravenstahl has noted that the city has hired people with past records who "proved to be good, quality employees."

Rick Shiloh sought to provide for his family, and he has done his job well, from all reports. This strapped city has only two painters to cover all its offices, warehouses, firehouses, police stations and swimming pools, and Rick is the younger of the two.

I'm fully aware the city will be damned if it does and damned if it doesn't here. The Department of Public Works is dealing with accusations of inconsistency in a lawsuit by a former city worker who was fired in 2007 for not revealing guilty pleas from the 1980s.

But the trouble with "zero tolerance" is that it leaves no room for redemption. Years of good, hard, honest work wind up counting for nothing. Do we go for boiler-plate consistency or case-by-case judgment?

A couple thousand years ago, another tradesman, a carpenter in Jerusalem, met a crowd hassling a woman for her transgressions. They were going to throw a lot more than the book at her, but this carpenter suggested that the one without sin cast the first stone.