I watched an interesting, pretty violent movie last night, "Law Abiding Citizen". It was centered on a man whose wife and child were violently killed in front of him, and after the legal system failed to exact real justice on the two killers, went on a vengeance spree that claimed the lives of many individuals who were related to the case in some way.
It was an interesting look at two relevent topics: 1) our imperfect legal system, and 2) the idea of taking justice into your own hands when "the system" has failed.
I agree with the movie that our legal system has failed true justice in many respects. With plea bargains, criminal informants, probation, etc our system in many ways enables criminals to commit more violent or felonious crimes because they know that the punishment, if they're caught, comes in now way close to a justice for their crimes.
I find it interesting that in today's legal system the first person to reach the courthouse get's off with the lightest sentence. For instance, if three men are involved with aggravated robbery and assault and they're all caught, it's the first one of the three to plead guilty and agree to testify that gets 3-5 years, rather than the 6-8 that the other guys are given. Rather than let them all plead guilty, the other two are used as trophies for the prosecuting attorneys and their teams.
The alternative of course is a system where you're guilty until proven innocent, but those systems don't seem to go so well and usually end up with more innocent people behind bars. It is unsettling, though, to think about the number of guilty people that are walking the streets because of legal loopholes, short sentences, probation, etc when they should be breaking rocks in the hot sun.
The other point is vengeance. This is pretty simple to me: I know that if my wife and kids were killed by some ruthless criminals (or any criminal for that matter) my gut instinct would be to rob them of their life in a slow and painful way. But what good would that do me? It wouldn't do me any good, of course...only get me in a much deeper hole than the one I would be trying to fill. The call is to render forgiveness, allowing Christ to fill our hearts and those of others when our fallen humanity simply wants to create havoc and hurt for those that did the same to us.
Herein is the quandary: as Christians we're called to love our enemies and forgive those who do us injustice. Christ dying on the cross was an injustice, and we're called to follow Him, are we not? And yet, we know that the justice system that has been crafted for our earthly society allows the guilty to walk without full restitution for their crimes and we complain. Where should Christian mercy and human justice truly meet and complement each other? How can we mesh the idea of "turning the other cheek" with a system that protects the innocent from those who would repeatedly take advantage of them? I don't have the answers...Do you? Post your thoughts, readers!
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