"Jesus Christ, Capital Defendant"

The title of this post is the headline given to this new commentary by Professor Mark Osler now up at the Huffington Post.  The full piece is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in either Jesus Christ or capital punishment, and these portions extends the piece's criminal justice insights beyond just the death penalty context:

The witnesses against Jesus conflicted and weren't credible, so the prosecutors searched for more who might tell a better story. In contemporary prosecution, this is akin to the search for defendants who will cooperate and testify credibly in exchange for a good plea deal, a process that sometimes skews justice.  Have you ever wondered why that servant girl found Peter in the courtyard and asked if he knew Jesus?  To a prosecutor, the answer is easy -- she had been sent to find additional witnesses to bolster the case.

Or take even one seemingly farcical part of Christ's trial, at its conclusion.  We are told that the prosecutor, Caiaphus, was frustrated with these conflicting witnesses and ripped his shirt, yelling, "Crucify him!" Sadly, that is a physical manifestation of an emotion most prosecutors will feel at one time or another.  There can arise within prosecutors (even within me, at times) a strong belief that the defendant is guilty and dangerous even when the evidence has failed to prove that true, leading to an indescribable frustration.  It is in these moments that prosecutors most often stretch, argue unfairly, or twist facts in an effort to bend the jury's will to what the prosecutor believes fervently to be true.  It is this passion that too often creates injustice in our own day, as in Christ's.

None of these echoes of Christ's journey in our modern system, of course, is in itself an overwhelming argument against the death penalty.  Nor is any bit of that story more of a condemnation of capital punishment than the fact that Christ came upon a legal execution and told the executioners that they did not have the moral authority to continue the killing (in John 8, the stoning of the adultress).  Still, I do think that there is something powerful in simply considering Christ as a criminal defendant.  That subtle change in perspective can change worlds.  No, Christ was no murderer. He was the opposite of the venal criminals who largely populate death rows.  Yet, it is at Christ's invitation that we visit him when we visit those in prison, and I would imagine that there is no exception for death row.  If it was God who wrote the story of Jesus as a criminal defendant, then it was God who told us that how we treat criminal defendants is important, and we need to heed that message even when it runs against our most fervent urge towards retribution and finality.