Despite a long list of wrongs in 2016, Gov. John Hickenlooper can set one thing right: Commute the sentence of Rene Lima-Marin.

You probably know Marin’s story. When Marin was a teenager barely old enough to smoke, he and an accomplice stupidly and wrongly robbed two Aurora video stores at gunpoint. Fortunately, no one was hurt during the 1998 robberies.

Marin was convicted in 2000 and sentenced to 98 years in prison as part of a plea bargain. His lawyers told him that if he behaved, he would serve only a few years.

In 2008, he was paroled.

Like so many parolees don’t, Marin turned his life around. He got a job as a glass glazer. He met a woman and fell in love. He adopted her son, and they got married and had a child of their own.

Six years later, after Marin had become the model of what we would hope all Colorado convicts become, Marin was notified that his parole had been a mistake. A clerk had made a recording error years ago, and he was inadvertently released early. A pack of cops arrived to take him back to prison.

So a man who’d done something heinously wrong, and then did something astonishingly right, now sits in prison, at a cost of about $34,000 a year to taxpayers.

As ridiculous as this all sounds, the insult to the public’s injury here is compounded by the fact that there are two easy remedies to the situation.

One, Marin’s case, which he appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court, has been sent back to Arapahoe County district court. Judge Carlos A. Samour has been pondering Marin’s fate for months, saying he needs to do more legal research before deciding what to do next.

It’s not a legal question any more. It’s a question of common sense and humanity. Marin spent eight years in prison. Eight years. He was released and not only complied with his parole terms, by all accounts he exceeded them. He undoubtedly proved his rehabilitation by being a contributing and responsible member of the community for six years. But because of the state’s mistake, not his, he is no longer paying taxes and is instead spending vast sums of the public’s money. He no longer is working to improve Colorado and the lives of his family, but he is instead risking his rehabilitation by being shut inside a system that has a dismal record of creating other success stories like Marin’s.

Samour should immediately amend his sentence and get Marin out of prison and home where he belongs.

But prosecutors, right here in Arapahoe County, are fighting against the appeal, saying that Marin eventually discovered the clerical error and didn’t tell state officials about it, which would have ended his freedom. Because he withheld that information, he’s not qualified for release.

Marin’s a convict, not an idiot.

Who among us in Marin’s position would have ratted themselves out to go back to prison? What law did Marin break by not incriminating himself and his future by revealing someone else’s error?

Regardless, there’s another way to correct this foolish error. Gov. John Hickenlooper can immediately commute Marin’s sentence, and probably have him home to start the new year where he belongs. In fact, 18th Judicial District Attorney George Brauchler last week on these opinion pages appealed to Hickenlooper to use his never-used power of pardon and commutation to give mercy and leniency where it’s so obviously deserved — just like this case.

While Brauchler could, and should, follow his own good advice and speed up correcting this wrong by asking his prosecutors to retract their objection for Marin’s appeal, Hickenlooper doesn’t have to wait for anyone or anything to simply do what government needs to do more of: the right thing.