We regularly are upset at the miscarriages of justice that occur on a regular basis in those parts of the world whose human rights principles are not as strong as they should be. Here is one case:
A woman was attacked and raped in the early 1980’s. A suspect was quickly found and convicted, despite shoddy police work and contradictory evidence:
- The woman said that the attacker was a constant smoker, but the convicted person was a medically documented severe asthma sufferer.
- The victim was asked to identify the attacker from a photo montage in which the convicted person’s photograph was the only Polaroid, the rest were regular photographs.
- Police officials told the victim that the convicted person was a previous violent offender despite the fact that he had no prior criminal record, was a college student, and a veteran.
- The convicted person was offered many fewer years in jail for a plea deal, but refused to accept it because he said he was innocent. Thus, he was sentenced to more years than he would have otherwise been.
- The convicted person was refused parole, though he was eligible, because a condition of parole was that he must admit his guilt, and he claimed to be innocent, thus he had to stay in jail.
- The convicted person died within 15 years because of asthma complications that probably would not have reached that stage had he been released earlier.
In 2008, DNA evidence that was re-tested at the family’s insistence showed that the convicted person had never committed the crime. Instead it had been committed by a felon that is currently serving time for other rapes committed at the same time in the same location. A judge has now exonerated the dead innocent.
So, what is the part of the world in which such a horrible miscarriage of justice can happen? What terrible place has such a clear example of Third World type of injustice?
Texas!
 Yes, Texas is the Third World country that has had the most exonerations, since the advent of modern testing and forensic techniques, of any other state in the Union. Consistently, case after case in Texas has been shown to have involved shoddy investigations techniques, actual lying, failure to test the evidence properly, planted evidence, etc. What an incredible shame that is to our country.
But, there is an even sadder side to this as well. Texas is home to some of the most devout and involved Christians in the nation, many of them evangelicals. The largest conservative Episcopal parish in the USA is found in Texas, for instance. Some strong financing for missions and for many healthy Christian works come out of the donors of Texas.
And, yet . . . . Sadly enough, many Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians have been among those who, for many years, insisted that we needed to have tougher laws that put more people behind bars for more years. That was the typical battle-cry of the last nearly 20 years, a battle-cry to which many politically conservative Christians added their voice. Any insistence on “justice” or “human rights” or on judicial oversight was proclaimed to be a liberal Christian thing, even if it were being said by Christians who were clearly theologically conservative, such as Ron Sider. An insistence on strict safeguards and procedures was seen as “coddling” criminals and hindering the course of “true justice.” And, the result has been: Texas!
Justice can never be divorced from a consideration of proper procedures, human rights, judicial oversight, and, yes, mercy. An insistence on punishment-only, without an equal insistence that the rights of all involved be protected leads to the many people who have been released from death rows since re-testing of evidence started to become commonplace. An insistence to prosecutors that they must have a high conviction rate or lose the next election, or that they must take people to court, even if the evidence is not strong, or they lose the next election, only leads to trials that should never have happened and convictions of innocent people. And, yet, that is what too often happened, beginning in the 1980’s and with the support of too many Christians.
The loss of safeguards leads to a loss of justice, inevitably, and every time. Worse, the loss of an emphasis on what God requires of you, to do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly before your God, leads to a Christianity that tolerates injustices every bit as morally indefensible as the injustices that were perpetrated in the Middle Ages. Our forefathers came to this country and wrote the Bill of Rights (as well as the Constitution) because they had experienced the results of that type of Middle Ages Christianity. Let us honor their memory by remaining strong supporters of the full Bill of Rights and not just one or two phrases within it, and by adopting their attitude that justice is best bridled and controlled so that it may not become injustice.
Our system is not full proof.
When our system was more lenient, the crime rate soared and millions more victims never got a chance to exercise their civil rights.
With modern advancments in science comes a greater opportunity for the truth to come out.
How many people have murdered or maimed by letting a murderer go free? Too many.
The argument is politically made that greater “leniency” means greater crime. But, a look at actual data does not make that correlation.
If you go to this blog you can see that there is no correlation between “leniency” or “rigorousness” of gun-control laws and either the rate of murder or the rate of robbery. There are other similar studies that show states that did not make their crime laws significantly more rigorous in the 1970’s and 1980’s and states that did make them more rigorous, and, again, there is no correlation between crime rate and either “leniency” or “harshness.”
What the increasing “harshness” of the laws has netted us is more innocents in prison and badly over-crowded prisons. Many of the people in prison are people that, in other First World countries, have been successfully dealt with with other means such as diversion programs, half-way houses, house arrest, etc., etc.
I work with ex-offenders. No sense reciting the many reasons why these folks get in trouble, it is familiar ground. The worst part of our system is the lack of support and help offenders get once they are out.
Basically, no one will hire a felon. They are released with no skills of any kind, many of them being incarcerated when very young. State pens make money on prisoners, they want to maximize their profit by offering the least amount of support and training they can get away with.
Naturally, they have no chance for any kind of life once they have paid their debt to society. It’s back on the streets, hustling, and eventually back to prison. And then, everyone wonders why the recidivism rate is so high. It’s a whole world that most people never see, nor do they choose to. It’s a whole lot easier just to repeat the party line.
Dave, I have worked in the inner city, and I agree with you. I have seen the remnants of our “punish them forever” mentality trying to eke out some type of living regardless of their qualifications.
Let’s go back to the seventies, then. What became of that?
Let ’em all go.
It’ll be great.
Well, I never said let them all go. But there were two comments I did make. One was that our current emphasis produces wrongful convictions too often for it to be acceptable. The second was in one of my replies where I commented that our current emphasis on pure retribution has kept us from making good use of alternative punishments that do not require imprisonment.
But DaveMc made one of the most telling comments when he pointed out that our current culture is very non-Christian in that the felon who has served his/her time is now unemployable and is forced out of society to the point that he/she ends up in recidivism. That is, he pointed out OUR clear sin in our handling of those who have theoretically paid their price but in actuality continue to be punished by us.
Fr. Ernesto,
As I started reading your post, I thought to myself, “hey, this sounds just like America.” When I read the bible, I realize that our system of justice is in many, if not most, cases anything but justice. Political conservatism of the “criminals belong behind bars” mentality is substituted for God’s system of restitution and restoration. Criminals have no debt to society. They have debt to their victims.
BTW, I’ve read your many comments on iMonk…
As clarification to my post, I want to add a few things.
First, the criminal justice system is flawed, but it does work and is mandatory to keep a society free from chaos. Being incarcerated for a felony is (depending on the severity) probably the only way to handle things right now. I don’t think it should ruin a kids life, however. Felons are dismissed as “Samaritan Tossers” and are buried into the thick undefined debris layer at the bottom of our society, in that neighborhood we never drive through. Problem solved.
Second, money is the fuel of this society. If you have a decent lawyer, you are far more likely to walk or plead out light than you will with a Public Defender. They are good people, good attorneys, but hideously overloaded. If a PD or a judge can take the easy way out to get a conviction, it would be tempting not to do that, given all the societal and political pressures to furnish a body count.
Lastly, regarding Steve’s comment about the debt to society vs debt to the victims. If we are wronged, we must voluntarily yield to the justice system, instead of putting a bullet in their head. Any debt is therefore one to society, not to us as individuals, and must be “paid off” to the satisfaction of the state.