Former attorney general Ramsey Clark thinks Saddam Hussein is being treated unfairly in his trial for war crimes. It isn’t all that newsworthy that President Lyndon Johnson’s top lawyer thinks the Iraqi tribunal is an illegal entity that violates due process. What is newsworthy is what Clark thinks about any punishment of any criminal. He doesn’t think it just should happen, at all.
Associated Press reporter Deborah Hastings sums up Clark’s judicial philosophy in this way:
Is Saddam’s prosecuting body, the Iraqi Special Tribunal, a legal entity? No, in his view. Is Saddam getting a fair trial? A resounding no. Is there any evidence that Milosevic, whose funeral he attended, actually ordered mass rapes and killings in the former Yugoslavia? Absolutely not, he says. But there is no mention of the humanity lost under the rule of his clients, or of the evils of genocide and murder. Or of what should be done with people who commit them. Instead, he lives in a reality of his own making, where the rules of rhetoric and logic apply to circumstances of his choosing. There is no evil. There is no death penalty. There are no prisons. He hesitates when asked what should replace the later two.” I don’t believe in punishment,” he says. Pressed to be more specific, he thinks a long while. Finally, he describes a place with “quarters that are reasonably comfortable, where guests can be received. Adequate food and clothing and health care. Where the family could come and live. ”Such thoughts have fueled some of the more benign criticism of Clark over the years – that he is gullible and misinformed.
There are a wide variety of views represented among Christians when it comes to the death penalty, prison reform, and other questions of the intersection of morality and criminal justice. Christians can debate what Paul means by the state’s God-ordained responsibility to “wield the sword” against “evildoers” (Rom 13). And some Christians who hold to the justice of capital punishment think it is too often unjustly applied in contemporary America. That’s an argument worth having.
In the same way, vigorous debates often ensue between those who support the common good of whether specific legal punishments are just, whether they fit the crime, or whether they “work” at all. And so there’s a legitimate argument to be had over whether the death penalty deters crime; and whether it is morally necessary even if it doesn’t.
Every once in a while, however, one comes face to face with an expressed view of justice, such as Clark’s, that sums up the philosophy of far more people than we imagine, a philosophy that’s often just beneath the surface of rational discourse. This is, I suspect, what’s often behind the rejection of the idea of hell, of divine judgment, of the need for propitiation. I fear there will be many at the judgment seat appealing not only that they don’t deserve God’s justice, but still maintaining that there is no such thing.
