Balancing Act

One Monday in April, Carl Hailey took the M16 automatic rifle he had gotten hold of from an old Marine Corps buddy, sneaked into the Ford county courthouse, and hid in a closet. Two hours later, as Billy Cobb and Pete Williams were being escorted from the jail to the courthouse for their bond hearing, Carl burst out of the closet and shot them both in the head and chest. There were two eyewitnesses. He left the rifle, covered with fingerprints, at the scene. Ten weeks later, Carl walked out of the courtroom, a free man; and everyone agreed that justice had been done. You see, Billy Cobb and Pete Williams had abducted and brutally raped Carl’s ten-year old daughter during a drunken spree, and then dumped her broken body into a ravine. Because the child lived, although permanently injured both physically and mentally, the most severe sentence either Billy and Pete would have gotten was 13 years in the state pen. So pretty much everyone agreed that if it had been their daughter they, too, would have gotten out their guns and gone after the pair. Justice had, indeed, been done. The only really surprising thing about the verdict was that Carl was black, Billy and Pete were white, and this was a Mississippi courthouse.

This scene or scenes like it are played out oftener than most of us probably want to realize. There is a deep human need to get even - to restore the balance - when violence occurs. Until things are put right, not only the individual who has been injured, but the entire community will be tense, unstable, ready to erupt. The need to get even is part of our craving for justice. It is a serious thing to shed blood. Violent injury creates a debt, a debt which if not paid will simply pile up on the ledger until the unpaid violence spills over, and violence in this country is rising. The recent Los Angeles riots were simply the best publicized sign. But behind the riots was the Rodney King beating. Behind the Rodney King beating was the Los Angeles crime rate. Behind the crime rate is more abuse and more brutality, some more subtle and some simply unreported. And it goes on all over the country. Washington DC sees more than one murder a day. Joggers in New York are set upon and beaten nearly to death. In Chicago’s inner city school children are killed by random bullets. Derelicts are burned to death in doorways. Policemen are shot on duty and innocent people are beaten up just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fear is everywhere. Anger is everywhere. Behind most acts of violence is another act of violence, and another and worse one is yet to come. And no one, white or black, believes that the court system is doing its job. No one believes that justice is being done. This is another kind of national debt, one we cannot pay, and it is mounting. Genesis 9:5-6 says, “...for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting... from each man I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man.”

What will stop the cycle of violence in this country?

Some people simply cry out for more law and order. Swifter punishment, more severe punishment, more certain punishment is the answer, they say. The way deterrence works is a simple mathematical equation: the severity of the punishment times the certainty of conviction must be greater than the reward of the crime. Make the severity and the certainty of the penalty great enough and the crime rate will drop.

This is true. It will work. Back in the Middle Ages, a charming fellow known as Vlad the Impaler ruled the duchy of Transylvania, near to where the Yugoslavian civil war is currently raging. His political philosophy was somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun, and his penal code was, to say the least, severe. However little we might approve of them, though, his methods were undoubtedly effective. They used to say that an 18-year-old virgin could walk start naked at midnight down the main street of any village in the duchy with a bag of gold clutched in her arms and no one would molest her. That’s domestic tranquility of a kind I think many of us here would envy.

But it comes at a cost. It comes at a cost most of us are unwilling to pay.

Americans want safety, yes; but we want justice, as well. We want to be able to hold our heads up. We want to live up to our own beliefs about ourselves. We look back in horror at English law of 200 years ago, when men, women, or children might be sentenced to death for picking pockets or stealing a loaf of bread, when starvation was no excuse, and when public hangings were public entertainment. We look in equal horror at the severity of the law in places like Saudi Arabia, where crimes may punished with flogging or even the loss of a hand. Comfortable middle class Americans don’t like the idea of “getting even,” and so much of the time we wring our hands in helpless confusion as the level of violence rises in this country. And the people who are being injured, the helpless, the disenfranchised, the victims, do not understand why they are not being protected. And so the fear and anger continue to rise.