Religious Justice

These boys didn’t get a fair trial. They got picked for wearing black clothes and having long hair. I am fundamentally opposed to the death penalty, and as Lenny Bruce said, "In the halls of justice, all the justice is in the halls." Perhaps, a jury is composed of twelve men and women of average ignorance; and a judge is a lawyer who once knew a politician. In our system of justice, the best client for a lawyer is a scared millionaire. The worst thing in our criminal justice system is to be broke or different.
-Tom Waits


Watching the Larry King Interview of Damien Echols, now on death row from a mob justice conviction for murdering 3 boys in Arkansas over 15 years ago, I was thinking I could see how this kind of thing could happen, that these three guys could be convicted for "Satanic crimes" they did not commit. They were outsiders in a Bible Belt microcosm that was looking for convenient scapegoats.

Tragedies invoke traumas. Senseless murders can so traumatize the victim's loved ones that people who oppose the death penalty can suddenly become avid seekers of someone's execution, as a kind of panacea and vengeance for grief. Also, pull in local bias into the mix ~ the conviction that all kids in black clothes and long hair are Satanists ~ and you have the Salem witch trials deja vu. We should remember that Jesus Christ was executed as a Satanist.

And who was it that plotted Jesus' death? The strictest of religious Jews, the most pious sect among them. The Pharisees wielded political power and influence. They could incite a mob. They could conspire to have their nemesis, Jesus, eradicated. They could even pervert Roman justice to achieve their devious, though outwardly "righteous", ends.

It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens. And today, this famous case of the West Memphis 3 Murders, should be reopened and retried, largely due to new DNA evidence that ties none of the three alleged murderers to the scene. It is entirely possible that the three are innocent, with two serving life sentences and one awaiting lethal injection.

I am someone that people would categorize as "religious", because I have faith in Christ. But it makes me wonder why religion can turn people, even believers in Christ, into something other than what he so evidently was: a man committed to justice. Perhaps I too would become a rabid seeker of vengeance if I found a child close to me murdered: perhaps I would demand to be repaid. Perhaps my trauma would blind me to the fact that I had found innocent young men to pay for a crime they didn't commit in order to satisfy my emotional need for a closure that never comes. Perhaps my personal bias against some outsider would make me feel justified in having them put to death to sate my need for vengeance.

It is really the opposite of how faith should motivate us. Faith puts the painful reality in God's hands even if human justice fails miserably: and it frequently does. "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord." It is criminally selfish of us to seek scapegoats to relieve us of our personal pain. All we do is compound the misery by pulling someone else into the black hole of a heinous crime.

As followers of Christ we should value justice, mercy, and kindness, even when seriously wronged. What good does it do to bring the legal hammer down on the innocent? It accomplishes nothing. Yet the Puritans did it. They brought a religious bias into the courtroom and became the new inquisitors, torturing and killing people Christ came to save.

Christ himself was an outsider. And he paid dearly for it.

He told us to clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, feed the hungry: that in so doing we were showing compassion to him. He is saying then that he identified with the outsider. The outsider is now in. He died as an outsider for the outsider. Yet it has been our lot in history to hate the outsider, round him up, put him in prison and even kill him. It makes me think we don't have a clue who Christ really was.