Stupidity and murder - where's the justice?

I have no embarrassment in declaring myself one of those who thinks that our judicial system exacerbates many of our social problems by being ‘soft’ on criminals. (I seem to remember, incidentally, that CS Lewis once wrote an essay, which must have been about sixty years ago, lamenting the same thing after some boys were apprehended for vandalizing his shed.)

You might think, then, I would be rejoicing that Edward Woollard, the 18-year old student who threw a fire extinguisher off the roof of 30 Millbank during the tuition fees protests last year, had received a jail sentence of two years and eight months.

On the contrary, I think it simply illustrates (and exacerbates) the problem. For in the same edition of the Daily Mail in which we can read about Woollard’s situation, we also see that Learco Chindamo, the man convicted of murdering headteacher Philip Lawrence, may have to serve an extra two years in jail over an alleged mugging he committed shortly after his release.

Now of course Chindamo may be entirely innocent in this instance. That is not the point that concerns me and will doubtless concern others. Rather it is the difficulty many of us outside the system have in making sense of the policy involved in such sentencing.

To begin with, Chindamo, was given what was described as a “life sentence” for a murder which the judge at the time described as “futile and un- provoked”. (Readers may recall that Lawrence stepped in to protect another boy being attacked by Chindamo and others.)

The first difficulty, then, is with this term “life sentence”. This is not simply a false expression, it is disingenuous, for it gives the impression of doing something that is not the case. ‘Life’ for a teenager does not consist of ‘the next fourteen years’ — indeed that doesn’t really begin to apply until you hit your sixties, and yet ‘life’ sentences continue to be given out to people considerably younger than myself.

Indeed, I suspect some research would show that the term “life sentence” is a hangover from the debate about abolishing the death penalty, when it was used as a justifying argument in favour of abolition: those who previously would have been executed would instead receive a “life sentence”. Now we know this is not true, we should surely drop the pretence.

Secondly, however, one cannot help comparing 14 years for murder with almost 3 years for throwing a fire extinguisher off a roof.

And here I would want to come to Mr Woollard’s defence. Of course what he did was wrong — and not just the throwing of the fire extinguisher, but the invasion of the building in the first place. However, it would appear to have been an act of monumental stupidity, not viciousness. Yes, people could have been killed, but they were not. Had they been, it would have been different, but that is surely to the point.

Most importantly of all, however, I would refer to the words of the judge who handed out the sentence:

... the courts have a duty to provide the community with such protection from violence as they can and this means sending out a very clear message to anyone minded to behave in this way that an offence of this seriousness will not be tolerated.

I could not agree more with the first part of this sentence. But I cannot see that a stupid act which might have killed someone equates mathematically to one fifth of the culpability of killing one person in the process of carrying out a gang attack on another — which is roughly the proportionality of the sentences in these two cases.

As a layman in these matters, I nevertheless feel that either Mr Chindamo has been treated too leniently or Mr Woollard too harshly. Either way, my confidence in the judicial system to remedy the problems of our society remains low.

John R Richardson
12 January 2011

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(Who says) the Iraq war was illegal?

Just a bit of musing before I go to bed, but I’ve been pondering on the question being addressed by social and political commentators as to whether the Iraq war was ‘illegal’. I was particularly struck by the fact that Guardian journalist George Monbiot not only thinks it was, but is particularly incensed at Tony Blair, to the extent that he has started a website calling for his arrest. Monbiot has also put up £100 ‘bounty’ as a contribution to the person who first arrests Blair.

Considering Monbiot’s clear sense of righteousness and the scale of the crime he alleges Blair has committed, this doesn’t seem to carry much practical conviction. Compare it with the £50,000 offered by Ross McWhirter for the arrest of PIRA bombers, which actually got him killed, and I think you’ll see what I mean. Nevertheless, it raises an interesting question as to what we mean by an ‘illegal’ war.

What is law?
Maybe I am naive, but I thought that, in common parlance, laws were statutes declared and established by competent bodies such as parliaments, monarchs, etc. I have found one definition of ‘law’ as “a rule or body of rules of conduct inherent in human nature and essential to or binding upon human society”, but this is itself arguable as a definition, and in any case there is clearly room for disagreement on what such rules might be.

In China, for example, the death penalty is ‘the law’ in many cases. Yet in the European Union, the death penalty is regarded as abhorrent. Who is right? The death penalty is clearly not ‘essential’ (as in the above definition), but it is equally clearly not antithetical to a stable and economically successful society, as China increasingly proves. (Indeed, it is arguable that the ruthlessness underlying the Chinese attitude to the death penalty has greatly contributed to China’s social and economic development.)

Moreover, there is surely a case for arguing that war is, indeed, inherent in human nature. Social conditioning may successfully persuade us otherwise, but wars and rumours of wars continue to abound.

It seems to me, then, that ‘law’ is more usefully considered as “the collection of rules imposed by authority”.

Under whose law?
Yet this definition immediately poses the question, “Whose authority?” And this raises the further question, “Over whom does this authority extend?”

Readers of the Bible will perhaps be familiar with the notion of the suzerainty treaty. This imposed certain terms and conditions (some welcome, some not so) on two parties, not by common agreement but by the stronger dictating to the weaker. We may feel this was ‘unjust’, but such treaties certainly had the force of law.

Indeed, I know people today who feel our own laws about smoking are also unjust, and are unreasonable. Yet the law is the law, and against their personal judgement those people have given up smoking in their own offices.

With the debatable exception of theocracies, the law, ultimately, is clearly a human invention. It is not determined by our DNA, or by the physical properties of the natural world, but arises out of our own, sometimes mixed and conflicting, understandings of right and wrong and of the necessary means to achieve what is widely (though not necessarily universally) regarded as justice.

It is thus, to an extent, always arbitrary and is limited in scope by the capacity of the lawmakers to enforce it.

Who is under the law?
Those familiar with our Book of Common Prayer may be aware of one particular manifestation of this principle, where it says in one of the prefaces that, “... in these our doings we condemn no other Nations, nor prescribe any thing but to our own people only.” This, it would seem, is another principle of the law: that it applies only to those people over whom the lawmakers, for whatever reason, have authority of some kind.

In this particular instance it meant the people under the authority of the English king (though it should be pointed out that this included not just the English but those in, as Article XXVII put it, “other his dominions” — such as Calais, for example). The point is, however, that just as the authority of the monarch extended to all his realm, the authority of others was excluded from that same realm. Thus, as the same Article says, “the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England.”

Now as is well known, this principle no longer applies, in that our Parliament now accepts the authority of European law and lawcourts. Nevertheless, their writ only runs here because we have agreed, through Parliament, to allow it to do so. It is perfectly possible, at least in theory, to overturn that situation, just as the English Reformation began with rejecting the legal authority of the Pope.

UDI
Back in 1965, the then Rhodesian government shocked the world, or the UK at least, with a Unilateral Declaration of Independence, freeing it from British rule. This was, of course, immediately declared illegal —indeed, it probably was against the law —but since it was a declaration (unilaterally) that the law no longer applied it posed certain questions about what ‘the law’ meant.

This was not the first time such a thing had been done, even to Great Britain. The United States of America had come about as the result of a rather more successful enterprise some years earlier.

But the point is this: if a nation, or a community, chooses to do so and has the physical power to carry out its wishes, it can simply leave one legal system and set up another of its own. There is no ‘natural’ law that prevents such a thing happening, nor is their a universally accepted legal framework which renders it illegal.

Back to Blair
And that brings me back to the question of Tony Blair, for we must ask whose law he is supposed to have broken, and why that law should apply to him. And we must also recognize that, if the United Kingdom so chose, it could —even against existing laws —simply act as nations have done in the past, and remove itself from a legal framework to which it takes exception.

In other words, Tony Blair may, by one definition, have ‘broken the law’, but the definition will, in the end, be entirely arbitrary, and could presumably just as easily be reshaped so that he is entirely immune from prosecution.

Comments, please!

Revd John Richardson
26 January 2010

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Entertaining doubts on a Sunday morning

This morning I found myself stepping down from the pulpit with a sense of doubt. These were not those ‘nagging’ doubts about God or the gospel —they usually come at about 4am, and I have learned to treat them as one does ‘mood swings’. No, this was a much more determined doubt, a ‘Have we got it right?’ doubt, an ‘Are we barking up entirely the wrong tree doubt?’, indeed a ‘Have I spent my whole life on the wrong cause?’ doubt, to do with Anglicanism.

To make matters worse, the reason was my own preaching. We’ve been working our way through Mark, and I had meant to spend just a few moments on 6:34, just before the feeding of the five thousand: “When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things.”

The plan was to point out to the congregation the link with Ezekiel 34, where the Lord condemned Israel’s ‘shepherds’, and then chapter 22 where we read about the conditions in Israel: corruption in high places, falsehood amongst the priests and prophets, and then in 22:29, “The people of the land practice extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the alien, denying them justice.”

However, I’d forgotten my notes (or rather I’d printed off last week’s sermon instead of this week’s) so I was ad-libbing slightly, and I began addressing the issue of social injustice. Here, from memory, is roughly how it went:

“The failure of the leadership —the shepherds —in Ezekiel’s day had created injustice,” I observed, “And we see much injustice around us in the world today. But look at what Jesus did when, in his day, he saw the people as ‘sheep without a shepherd’.”

“What would we do in the same circumstances?” I asked. “Surely we would try to address the causes of injustice. But what does Jesus do? It says, ‘He began to teach the many things.’ But how would this help? The answer is that injustice is, in the end, caused by people, and so by teaching the people, Jesus was addressing the injustice.”

“But Jesus was not addressing the rich and powerful. So how would that help reduce injustice? Because he was empowering the poor by what he taught them. And that is the best way to reduce injustice, because there are more poor people than rich and powerful people. So in England, in the eighteenth century, the Wesleys empowered the poor, not the rich and the powerful, by preaching the gospel to them and empowering them, and they changed societies and communities.”

But as I was preaching, I could feel at the back of my mind a realization that what I was saying didn’t quite work. So often, the gospel has not changed society, because it has not empowered people. And my doubt is this: whether Anglicanism, and specifically the Anglican understanding of priesthood, will always disempower people, and can therefore never really change society.

As evidence of this, look at all the fuss that is made about ordination generally and women’s ordination in particular. Where in the pages of the New Testament do we ever find a heated discussion about ordination? Circumcision, yes, but ordination?

And then what about the link between ordination and the sacraments? It is no wonder people want to get ordained in the Church of England, if this is the only way you can, literally, get your hands on sacramental ministry. Hence women’s ordination is an issue of ‘justice’ because ordination is power. But where is ordination an issue in the New Testament?

I simply do not find convincing the argument that Jesus passed this on as an ‘apostolic’ ministry at the Last Supper. Michael Green, when he was principal of St John’s Nottingham, used to point out how in the Corinthian correspondence a great deal was said about the Lord’s Supper and the need for discipline, but nothing about who should ‘celebrate’ it. As he said, can you imagine that in a situation parallel to what we find in Anglicanism today?

So I found myself with my head in my hands after the sermon (people probably thought I was praying) wondering if we haven’t got it all wrong. How is the Church going to empower the poor, when the ‘rich’ —the rich in talent, and learning, and leadership qualities, and language skills, and the ability to work the middle-class ‘system’ of Bishops’ Advisory Panels and DDOs —monopolize the ministry of word and sacrament? Surely this is why the Church of England has never truly reached the poor in this country (except through works of ‘charity’, done in a condescending way and never really making a difference) and why only truly ‘indigenous’ ministry from the poor to the poor can work to transform the poor, such as we see, for example, in the best of Pentecostalism.

In short, am I simply part of the problem —along with all my dog-collard brothers and sisters —because merely by being what I am, I stifle the life of the Spirit by creating a dependency culture? Am I not colluding in the power structures, even whilst I try to preach the gospel for the poor? Are we not just as fearful as the religious leaders were in Jesus’ day, that if just ordinary people took on the privileges of priests and bishops then we would lose our influence?

I note that in Acts 4:13, the Sanhedrin saw that Peter and John were ‘agrammatoi kai idiōtēs’. The NIV translates this, ‘unschooled, ordinary men’. A more blunt version would be ‘ungrammatical idiots’. Would you and I trust them with what they were doing? I ask again, “What would Jesus do?”

Revd (still) John P Richardson
19 July 2009

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A Jubilee for the West?

I've just had an idea which has got to be worth a go.

The Jubilee Debt Campaign has long been pushing for the cancellation of debts owed by the Third World, for reasons outlined here.

However, it is now surely the case that countries like Great Britain owe (or will soon owe) sums that dwarf the debts of typical Third World nations. Moreover, they too owe this money to wealthy lenders in wealthy countries. Again, as in the Third World, it is the average citizen, not the super-wealthy minority, who will ultimately have to pay the interest and the capital of these loans and who will suffer the consequences of indebtedness entered into by their governments.

The solution, however, is obvious: extend the Jubilee to the West. Indeed, I am rather warming to the Jubilee Debt Campaign's proposal here:

9. How do we prevent future debt crises? We need economic justice - covering debt, trade, aid, tax, etc - and responsible financing in the future. There must be international action to ensure that we never return to a debt crisis like the one which has now been crushing poor countries for decades. After the 'clean slate' of cancellation of unjust ('illegitimate') and unpayable debts, this will mean firstly that there must be just trade rules, a just tax system, and sufficient, high-quality aid – with a bias towards grants not loans – so that countries are not forced back into indebtedness. It also means that any future loans should be given responsibly, on fair terms, and in a transparent way which is open to scrutiny by parliaments, media and citizens. Any loans given on unjust terms should be considered the responsibility of the creditor and therefore eligible for cancellation in future.

In fact, if we can combine the principles of the Jubilee Debt Campaign with the approach of our present government, everybody wins (almost)! We can borrow the money, return to full prosperity and not be saddled with endless repayments. Magic!

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It’s OK - he’s not evil, he’s just mad

The police reaction to the apparent attempt by Nicky Reilly, said to be a convert to Islam, to explode a bomb or bombs in Exeter is clearly meant to calm public fears. “It’s OK,” seems to be the message, “Because this is a man with a ‘history of mental illness.’”

So it was the work of a madman. Nothing to worry about there, then.

Personally, I’m not quite as reassured as I’m clearly meant to be. The real issue here is whether, as the police are suggesting it, ideas were planted in Mr Reilly’s head not by his ‘madness’ but by people who want to bomb family restaurants in cities across the country.

I would further be interested to know the nature of Mr Reilly’s ‘historic’ mental illness. Has he been treated for schizophrenia or depression? Either is very unpleasant, but whereas the former involves a detachment from reality, the latter is more an exaggerated, but normal, reaction to real life — and is, moreover, very common. In other words, Mr Reilly may not be what we would popularly characterize as ‘mad’, but actually completely sane.

The myth that suicide bombers (of any stripe, Muslim, Tamil, Bushido, etc) are ‘mad’ is the way people who don’t understand their motivation try to protect themselves from the unpalatable truth. ‘Madmen’ who want to take over the world are actually far less frightening than entirely sane people who want to do the same (unless wanting to take over the world is seen as definitive of madness).

The bottom line, though, is that when it comes to evil ambition we’re all a bit ‘mad’ that way. I remember vividly a conversation with the Australian artist, George Gittoes, who was actually present with an Australian Defence Forces medical team at the Kibeho camp during the Rwandan massacres. What he saw there, and depicted subsequently in his paintings, would make any ‘sane’ person plead for the God of heaven to come down in wrath and burn up the evildoers.

What I can’t forget, though, is his observation that both those who were massacred and those doing the massacring went to church that morning.

George Gittoes is a remarkable man (and slightly scary), not least because he is a man of faith. (He once painted the Dalai Lama’s portrait, at his request, and said it was very strange trying to hold a conversation on spiritual matters with a religious leader who doesn’t believe in God.) Most remarkable of all, though, is his ability to see goodness in situations where most of us would despair of God’s existence at all: the preacher, bringing comfort to those about to be killed, as he himself undoubtedly was; the badly injured woman who carried the wounded to the first-aid post until she died.

The point is, any one of us could be any one of those people. We could be the person who hid in the camp cess-pit (the ‘shitter’ as George called it), driven literally mad with fear. We could be the army commander who oversaw the massacre but ‘allowed’ the Australian medics (armed only with a few rifles) to treat anyone who wasn’t actually left dead. We could be the men with the machetes. We could be the victims, or the medical team. Press the right (or wrong) buttons, and you get out the most astonishing good, or the purest evil.

I’m not sure where this is taking me, except to reflect once again on how little we care to think about reality. Much better that we should be threatened by madmen than the sane. Let nothing disturb us, so we can sit in front of the TV watching ‘reality TV’ (an oxymoron of the first order), like ‘I’d do anything’, and wondering desperately who will be the next Nancy. At least we’re not hurting anyone else. But then we’re not exactly reflecting the image of God, either, I think.

The other thing, I suppose, is that salvation is not a ‘bonus prize’ awarded to those who aren’t the ‘evil’ people exploiting the poor or using up the world’s oil. Inside each of us is something that we really would rather not see. Salvation is not just to fullness of life, it is from our own sinfulness, which is held in check by our veneer of civilization, but which, given the opportunity, would result in something that would make ‘madness’ the best excuse we could offer.

Revd John P Richardson
23 May 2008

PS George Gittoes allowed me free use of ‘The Preacher’ on the front of my book, Revelation Unwrapped. He has never asked a penny in return and got quite cross when I tried to offer him some!

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