Justice, Mercy, Expedience: Long Post, Shortened Unmercifully

It is in our Christian culture, our religious beliefs, to forgive. We can be redeemed. We can, in some formulations, only be forgiven if we ourselves forgive. Yet in this belief system there is also heaven and hell. Souls that go to hell have done the unforgivable. That's latent in this formulation too.

I have re-written this post at least a hundred times. I left in all the extremes, because that's the fast way to get to the point.

Rwanda

After atrocities like Rwanda, international courts seek to bring justice. In such cases, the scale is always so huge. You cannot put half of a country in jail or execute them (anyway, the international courts don't use the death penalty.) So there is always a huge push for every victim to forgive. To move along and rebuild courtesy of global aid networks. It avoids reprisals, a re-escalation to civil war. Because there won't be any justice in another war. More kids will starve. More people will be violated.

But it is also convenient. It is a move that stops justice early, to avoid stopping justice too late. All forms of expedience in law stop justice too early--or too late.

The Death Penalty

Many people are against the death penalty because it is unhappily expedient. It ends the chance of re-education, reconciliation, societal forgiveness or personal redemption; it can be applied to the innocent, used to prop up bad regimes and express old prejudices. These charges are true.

These anti-death penalty people are cautious. They also, by limiting the risk of a wrongful death, allow the unrepentant to continue to live, sometimes repatriate to society at large. That is also a risk, a human-rights violation that is not considered in the formula.

We have not stopped risk, or even expedience, by privileging a commutable life sentence over a death penalty. We have only shifted the burdens of risk and expedience around somewhat, onto a different group. This may or may not be advisable.

Expedience, or Exhaustion?
Crime victims have always had to cope, because nothing can fully remedy the loss. Law enforcement knows that however well-supported, they enter situations of risk. Shut the hell up and endure: nothing new there.

It's just that more areas have less and less order, more and more victims. Law enforcement has less and less resources, more and more rules of engagement. An overrun system cannot handle crime. And the lack of capability is now supported by a virtuous principle, falsely applied. Crime victims and law enforcement are often hit with a societal expectation--to forgive, or to accept--by people who have never known the pain. Or who inflicted it.

We put the burden on the already-burdened. That's the rape victim, the parents of a murdered child, the store-owner who's going out of business because of shoplifting and repeated aggravated burglary, the stressed police officer or health official or police orphan, and, on a much-larger scale, the survivors of Rwanda. On top of everything else, these victims are supposed to forgive and forget.

A New Idea
Recently I found  this book, with the dubious title Resentment's Virtue. It's very true that you can find a book these days that will support anything. Nevertheless, I am going to order it. It's about mass atrocities such as the Holocaust or Rwanda. Here's a quote. It may even apply to criminal justice:

When societies try to �move on� after mass atrocity, victims who cannot or will not abide with the call to forgive and reconcile are often pictured as �prisoners of the past�: traumatized, self-preoccupied, resentful, and vindictive. 

To be able to forgive or forget is generally taken to be morally and therapeutically superior to harboring resentment and other �negative� emotions.  

But, perhaps,sometimes, when one is dealing with extreme horrors and evildoers, it could be the other way around. Possibly, there are circumstances in which forgiving is a temptation, a promise of relief that might be morally dubious. 

Indeed, the refusal to forgive may represent the more demanding moral accomplishment.

Perhaps even long-standing resentment has to be judged differently when societies abandon survivors and grant amnesty to the perpetrators of heinous deeds.

So I suggest that much of the massive support for victim's rights is a false reparation for injustice, an unmerciful act.  I think the vast majority of victim advice covers a grand lie--it is victim indoctrination.

Society can say this to the victims of Rwanda or a heartbroken family member or devastated crime victim: we privilege order over disorder. You may not seek revenge, because it is disorder. But society does not have to intrude on people's emotions, force them to un-think or un-feel.

Mercy is personal. It has a place in court, on the curb, and in the heart. But mercy has requirements. Mercy requires remorse.

It is possible to 'get on with life' without forgiving atrocities, forgetting them, or permitting them. Forgiveness, in many senses, is the death of reform, revision, and renewal. That too seems to have been forgotten.

I think I see less remorse and more calls to forgive.  I think expedience represents a failure, a limitation, a curtailment of life. We undoubtedly have to employ expedient measures. The question is always which ones.