110 Sermon Illustrations on Justice

Version adapted by Rev. David Holwick:

In 1995, Robert Harlan kidnapped a waitress and assaulted her. She escaped and flagged down a female motorist. Mr. Harlan caught up with the two women, shot the driver, leaving her paralyzed, then beat and killed the waitress. He was arrested, put on trial and found guilty. Then the penalty phase began.

Mr. Harlan's lawyers urged the jurors to consider biblical wisdom and find mercy in their hearts “as God ultimately took mercy on Abraham.” They also made several references to Mr. Harlan's soul and his habit of reading the Bible with his father.

The judge told the jury to go beyond the narrow confines of the law in thinking about the death penalty. They were told to make an “individual moral assessment.”

The jury went into their room and began deliberating. Several of them took out their Bibles to see what it said about the death penalty. Then the jury voted unanimously for death.

Because they used their Bibles, the Colorado Supreme Court reversed their decision and gave Mr. Harlan life in prison. They said the jury was not allowed to bring a “higher authority” into the jury room beyond the evidence in the trial. Even though the witnesses were sworn in on Bibles - and the defense attorneys quoted the Bible - and the judge told them to go beyond the law on the issue.

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Original article:

In a sharply divided ruling, Colorado's highest court on Monday upheld a lower court's decision throwing out the sentence of a man who was given the death penalty after jurors consulted the Bible in reaching a verdict. The Bible, the court said, constituted an improper outside influence and a reliance on what the court called a “higher authority.”

“The judicial system works very hard to emphasize the rarified, solemn and sequestered nature of jury deliberations,” the majority said in a 3-to-2 decision by a panel of the Colorado Supreme Court. “Jurors must deliberate in that atmosphere without the aid or distraction of extraneous texts.”

The ruling involved the conviction of Robert Harlan, who was found guilty in 1995 of raping and murdering a cocktail waitress near Denver. After Mr. Harlan's conviction, the judge in the case - as Colorado law requires - sent the jury off to deliberate about the death penalty with an instruction to think beyond the narrow confines of the law. Each juror, the judge told the panel, must make an “individual moral assessment,” in deciding whether Mr. Harlan should live.

The jurors voted unanimously for death. The State Supreme Court's decision changes that sentence to life in prison without parole.

In the decision on Monday, the dissenting judges said the majority had confused the internal codes of right and wrong that juries are expected to possess in such weighty moral matters with the outside influences that are always to be avoided, like newspaper articles or television programs about the case. The jurors consulted Bibles, the minority said, not to look for facts or alternative legal interpretations, but for wisdom.

“The biblical passages the jurors discussed constituted either a part of the jurors' moral and religious precepts or their general knowledge, and thus were relevant to their court-sanctioned moral assessment,” the minority wrote.

Legal experts said that Colorado was unusual in its language requiring jurors in capital felony cases to explicitly consult a moral compass. Most states that have restored the death penalty weave in a discussion of moral factors, lawyers said, along with the burden that jurors must decide whether aggravating factors outweigh mitigating factors in voting on execution.

“In Colorado it's a more distinct instruction,” said Bob Grant, who was the prosecutor in the Harlan case. Mr. Grant said no decision had been made yet on whether to appeal to the United States Supreme Court.

Legal scholars say the connection between hard legal logic and the softer, deeper world of values is always present in jury rooms, whether acknowledged or not.

“The court says we're asking you to be moral men and women, to make a moral judgment of the right thing to do,” said Thane Rosenbaum, a professor of law at Fordham University School of Law in New York City, and author of the book “The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What's Right” (HarperCollins, 2004). “But then we say the juror cheated because he brought in a book that forms the basis of his moral universe,” Professor Rosenbaum said. “The thing is, he would have done it anyway, in his head.”

Other legal experts say the Colorado decision touches on an issue that courts do not like to talk about: that jurors, under traditions dating to the days of English common law, can consider higher authority all they want, and can convict or acquit using whatever internal thoughts and discussions they consider appropriate.

In this instance, lawyers said, there was simply a clearer trail of evidence, with admissions by the jurors during Mr. Harlan's appeal that Bibles had been used in their discussion. One juror testified she studied Romans and Leviticus, including Leviticus 24, which includes the famous articulation of Old Testament justice: “eye for eye, tooth for tooth.”

Professor Howard J. Vogel, who teaches ethics at Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul and has a master's degree in theology as well as a law degree, said, “I don't think it's a religious text that's the problem here, but rather whether something is being used that trumps the law of the state.”

The Bible is hardly monolithic about what constitutes justice. Some legal experts say the jurors might just as easily have found guidance that led them to vote to spare Mr. Harlan's life. Lawyers for Mr. Harlan also specifically urged the jurors to consider biblical wisdom, according to the Supreme Court's decision, with a request that they find mercy in their hearts “as God ultimately took mercy on Abraham.”

The lawyers also made several references to Mr. Harlan's soul and his habit of reading the Bible with his father, the court said.

Mr. Harlan was convicted of kidnapping a waitress, Rhonda Maloney, and raping her. She escaped and flagged down a motorist, Jaquie Creazzo. Mr. Harlan caught up with the two women, shot Ms. Creazzo, leaving her paralyzed, then beat and killed Ms. Maloney.

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"The essential act of mercy was to pardon; and pardon in its very essence involves the recognition of guilt and ill-desert in the recipient. If crime is only a disease which needs cure, not sin which deserves punishment, it cannot be pardoned. How can you pardon a man for having a gumboil or a club foot? But the Humanitarian theory wants simply to abolish Justice and substitute Mercy for it. This means that you start being “kind” to people before you have considered their rights, and then force upon them supposed kindnesses which no one but you will recognize as kindnesses and which the recipient will feel as abominable cruelties. You have overshot the mark.

"Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful. That is the important paradox. As there are plants which will flourish only in mountain soil, so it appears that Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crannies of the rock of Justice: transplanted to the marshlands of mere Humanitarianism, it becomes a man-eating weed, all the more dangerous because it is still called by the same name as the mountain variety."

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C. S. Lewis in GOD IN THE DOCK; quoted in THE QUOTABLE LEWIS edited by Wayne Martindale and Jerry Root (Tyndale House) p. 426.

To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. — Romans 3:26.

A little girl of twelve being asked by her mother if she were afraid to die, replied, “No, mother.” “On what are you depending?” her mother asked. “On the justice of God,” said the little girl. Her mother was surprised and said, “You mean the mercy of God, don’t you, dear?” “No, mother” said the little girl, “I mean the justice of God. You know, mother, all my sins were laid on Jesus, and He bore my punishment. God in His justice will not punish me too.”

The perfect righteousness of God

Is witnessed in the Saviour’s blood.

‘Tis in the cross of Christ I see,

How God can save and righteous be.

In a just society, acquitting the innocent is no less important than convicting the guilty. The principle that an accused person is to be presumed innocent until proven guilty is, therefore, fundamental to our American sense of justice. Americans generally believe that the innocent should be protected at all costs, and this includes making every possible effort to avoid punishing them for crimes of which they are not guilty.

This emphasis on protecting the innocent is based on a long Western tradition. It was foreshadowed by Exodus 23:7, “Have nothing to do with a false charge and do not put an innocent or honest person to death, for I will not acquit the guilty.” Even in the early days of Israel, God clearly emphasized the importance of protecting the innocent.

Sir John Fortescue, an English jurist, believed that every effort should be made to give the benefit of the doubt to the accused: “Who, then, in England, can be put to death unjustly for any crime? Since he is allowed so many pleas and privileges in favor of life. None but his neighbors, men of honest and good repute, against whom he can have no probable cause of exception, can find the person accused guilty. Indeed, one would much rather that twenty guilty persons should escape punishment of death than that one innocent person should be condemned and suffer capitally.”

William Blackstone, famous for his four volume “Commentaries on the Laws of England” published between 1765-1769, explained that “the law holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” He viewed the protection of the innocent as far more important than the condemnation of the guilty. This idea is the basis of the principle that the accused is innocent until proven guilty. It is not enough that people be suspicious of one man’s conduct, or even that they believe he probably committed a wrongful act. No, a man must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have committed a crime in order to be convicted.

In 1895, the United States Supreme Court affirmed the importance of protecting the innocent in the case of Coffin v. U.S. The court believed that the presumption of innocence was so important that it reversed a lower ruling and required a new trial for the defendant because the lower court judge hadn’t made it clear to the jury that the accused was to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Developments in science are helping to advance the protection of the innocent in America’s courts and to overturn convictions that were wrongfully obtained. Thanks to advances in DNA technology, those who have been mistakenly convicted in the past can sometimes be exonerated and set free through the presentation of DNA evidence. Since 1989, post-conviction exoneration has been achieved in 208 cases, 145 having occurred after 2000. This technological leap has greatly assisted our ability to pursue justice and protect the innocent.

Seventy-seven percent of the 208 wrongful convictions were the result of misidentification by witnesses. As a trial lawyer, I can attest that eyewitness observations are often fraught with error. The stress of exigent circumstances, the vantage point of one’s view, difficulties with seeing or hearing, and the power of suggestion can adversely influence one’s perception and memory of observed events. Sadly, these flawed observations sometimes lead to wrongful convictions. Thankfully, however, some of those who were wrongly condemned now have hope through post-conviction access to DNA evidence. Forty-two states currently give prisoners access to DNA evidence in some form, in order to further their ability to defend themselves against wrongful convictions.

This new technology doesn’t just protect the innocent -- it can also help to determine the guilty. Out of the 208 exonerations mentioned above, suspects or the true perpetrators have been identified in 77 cases.

DNA technology is helping to further the cause of justice by correcting occasional failings due to human perception, memory or manipulation. The men who have been exonerated had already spent, on average, 12 years in prison -- a sobering statistic to anyone concerned with fashioning a just society.

All jurisdictions should embrace these scientific advances and incorporate them into their justice systems. While the possibility of a wrongful conviction can never be eliminated in its entirety, we must never cease in our quest to protect the innocent, even while convicting the guilty. A society cannot fairly call itself “just” unless it is vigilant to prevent and correct miscarriages of justice.

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Ken Connor is chairman of the Center for a Just Society based in Washington D.C., online at www.centerforajustsociety.org.

Sermon in Exodus series, #15. Exodus 23:1-13

AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

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I. Justice is a lady.

A. For ages, statues have depicted Lady Justice with three symbols.

B. What exactly is justice?

C. Justice is not limited to establishing what is right.

II. Do justice right.

A. This passage is an expansion of the ninth commandment.

B. Justice has to be blind.

C. Compassion for enemies. 23:4-5

D. Compassion for land.

III. Do God right.

A. Don't invoke false gods. 23:13

B. Follow a cycle of worship.

C. Worship him the way he wants it.

IV. God helps those who honor him.

A. His angel will go ahead of them. 23:20

B. Follow God and he will give positive blessings.