What About The Thief on the Cross?

A question from a high-school lunch table followed Luke Metzger to a jail study in Russellville and then to a taxi window in Colombia: what about the thief on the cross? He takes the story on its own terms first — Luke 23, a condemned man who feared God, admitted his guilt and was told he would be in paradise — then tests the four assumptions the argument needs: that the man had never been baptized, that his circumstances resemble ours, that the change of covenants does not matter, and that Jesus' plain words about baptism can be softened.