New Jersey’s favorite son, Dr. Mehmet Oz, demanded that his senatorial rival, Pennsylvania Lt. Governor John Fetterman, fire two staffers from his campaign, ironically named “Horton.”

In 1993, Lee and Dennis Horton were accused of providing a ride to a friend who killed a man at a Philadelphia bar. The brothers, who insisted they were innocent, declined plea bargains that would have seen them released from prison in 5 to 10 years, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, and received life sentences instead.

They were ultimately released in 2021 after the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons, which Fetterman chairs, unanimously recommended that their sentences be commuted.

Should Fetterman have put the Horton brothers on hfis staff? Sure. Why not? And Oz has nothing to say about it. To the extent Oz thinks it reflects anything about Fetterman that he can use to get a vote, he’s free to use it. That’s politics, but it has nothing to do with the Horton brothers, whose life sentences were commuted.

Lee and Dennis Horton got a second chance. And Fetterman decided to put it to use on his staff. The law can be pretty good that way, even if it fails to live up to its potential much of the time. It’s people, like Oz, who make it an issue. While activists hate this framing, it’s still the best way to communicate the idea: the Hortons have paid their debt to society. It’s over. Now they get to return and use their second chance to enjoy a happy, successful, fulfilling life to the extent they can. Because their debt is paid.

But what about Lea Michele’s debt? Who, you ask? The dark-haired kid from the TV show Glee who got to sing all the good songs. She was the star and apparently she knew it.

She broke out on her television series “Glee” by performing numbers like “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from “Funny Girl,” which depicts the life of the early-20th-century comedian Fanny Brice and made an icon out of a young Barbra Streisand. But things got complicated: In 2020, Ms. Michele was accused of disparaging behavior on the set of “Glee.” So when the role went to Beanie Feldstein last year — the director thought Ms. Michele, who had just had a baby, wouldn’t be ready to return to work — the schadenfreude was swift. Ms. Michele’s name trended on Twitter as fans imagined her rage at being passed over.

Michele got canceled after she twitted something condemning racism following the murder of George Floyd and one of the other people on the show took issue with her, after which others chimed in that she was a mean girl.

Ms. Michele had been accused by Samantha Marie Ware, a Black actress who appeared on “Glee,” of “traumatic microaggressions” toward her during their time working together and of humiliating her in front of cast mates. (Ms. Ware declined my request to be interviewed.) Ms. Michele quickly apologized in a statement, before largely receding from view, but a deluge of criticism followed — including other former cast mates who called her “terrifying,” “unpleasant” and a “nightmare” to work with. When Ms. Michele’s comeback as the new star of “Funny Girl” was announced in July, one theater blogger wrote, “I feel as if I’m watching a Karen win a Nobel Peace Prize.”

Just in case the accusation of “traumatic microaggressions” is a bit too vaguely conclusory and insipidly meaningless, the detail is that Michele told Ware she would “shit in her wig.”

Is this racist or did Michele just not like Ware? Or was Michele just a difficult person? Or was she a miserable human being? Beats me, but she neither killed nor was involved in the murder of any person. And yet, she was canceled, losing the Fanny Brice gig on Broadway. Not funny for Michele.

Until very recently, America was a place where fresh starts were celebrated, championed, romanticized, rooted for (if sufficiently earned). The idea of second chances is a centerpiece of rehabilitation and renewal programs, with organizations named for it and even a month devoted to it by the White House. In restorative justice circles — in which those who committed an act of harm may sit down with their victim or a broader community to try to make amends — one of the core principles is that people are never the sum of their worst mistakes. Even, presumably, Ms. Michele, who starts performances in “Funny Girl” tonight.

To be fair, this is mostly honored when creating tee-shirts and coffee mugs as opposed to real life where glorious ideals are more deeply appreciated from a safe distance.

And yet when it comes to the culture, where social media has become arbiter and it can feel as though everybody is apologizing all the time, we don’t have a very good way of talking about redemption or who should be afforded it.

Lee and Dennis Horton were sentenced to life imprisonment, but they had the opportunity to present their case to the Board of Pardons. A person was murdered, and yet they could seek commutation, redemption, a second chance.

Lea Michele was canceled, without trial or appeal, but she’s now been given a second chance to play the funny girl.

Robert J. Bies, a professor of management at Georgetown University who teaches a course called Heroes and Villains, has studied the phenomenon of celebrity second chances. He noted that, in the criminal justice world, for all its flaws and inequities, there is a process — or at least an effort at a methodology — when it comes to ex-offenders who want to re-enter society. Even with a celebrity like Martha Stewart, who served five months in federal prison for lying about a stock sale, there is a sense on the part of the public that she “did her time,” he told me.

It’s about celebrities only because we hear about them. They make the papers. Ordinary people disappear from view, canceled, never to be heard from again. If only they were killers, they might seek redemption and get a second chance.