Restorative Justice : "she described the experience as a 'complete relinquishment of anger, hatred and the desire for retribution and revenge.'”

I first heard the idea of restorative justice discussed in depth at a conference in India.   I wrote at the time:

Jirgas - The Pakistani equivalent of the Panchayat, though I think these are made up of village elders who may not be elected. While some cases have brought international condemnation of jirga decisions, conference attendees argued that millions of decisions are made regularly that generally satisfy both parties. Some conference presenters talked about restorative justice as an alternative to retributive justice. Instead of punishment being the object, making the victims whole is the object. However, when the discussion got to Jirgas, making the victims whole included things such as: A male member of the family has murdered someone. To make the victim's family whole, a sister of the murderer is given to the victim's family. One presenter, a very articulate Pakistani attorney, argued that this does not come from Islamic law, but from tribal law. Such verdicts have caused Jirgas to be outlawed, but they still exist and fill an important need.
But the idea of letting the victims and the perpetrators be part of resolving the crime seems to make sense. 

My daughter emailed me a NYTimes article on restorative justice. A long ten page article about a nineteen year old who killed his girlfriend after they had argued for 38 hours.  The girl's dying words to her father were to forgive her boyfriend.  Both families knew each other well.  The young man's father went to the hospital when he got the word, before he went to see his son.

The article describes the long process of finding a restorative justice expert who could help the Florida prosecutor set up a process that the State could accept.  It's a story we should all think about when we ponder all the people in prisons in the United States.  There are a lot of push-button emotional issues in this stories.  And the comments are also well worth reviewing.  

This is a unique case where all the right pieces were in place.

I think the key, counter-intuitive result of forgiveness in this case, is what it does to those who forgive, more than what it does to the person forgiven.

The Grosmaires said they didn’t forgive Conor for his sake but for their own. “Everything I feel, I can feel because we forgave Conor,” Kate said. “Because we could forgive, people can say her name. People can think about my daughter, and they don’t have to think, Oh, the murdered girl. I think that when people can’t forgive, they’re stuck. All they can feel is the emotion surrounding that moment. I can be sad, but I don’t have to stay stuck in that moment where this awful thing happened. Because if I do, I may never come out of it. Forgiveness for me was self-preservation.”

The story ends with:

“Forgiving Conor doesn’t change the fact that Ann is not with us. My daughter was shot, and she died. I walk by her empty bedroom at least twice a day.” 

But then if Conor had been executed, her daughter would still have been dead and she would still walk by her empty bedroom each day.  

Oh, the quote in the title is about "Sujatha Baliga, a former public defender who is now the director of the restorative-justice project at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Oakland."  She, herself, was the victim of abuse from her father.  She talked to the Dalai Lama about her anger for an hour.

He gave her two pieces of advice. The first was to meditate. She said she could do that. The second, she says, was “to align myself with my enemy; to consider opening my heart to them. I laughed out loud. I’m like: ‘I’m going to law school to lock those guys up! I’m not aligning myself with anybody.’ He pats me on the knee and says, ‘O.K., just meditate.’ ” 

 But later, in a ten day meditation class.

On the final day, she had a spontaneous experience, not unlike Andy Grosmaire’s at his daughter’s deathbed, of total forgiveness of her father. Sitting cross-legged on an easy chair in her home in Berkeley, Calif., last winter, she described the experience as a “complete relinquishment of anger, hatred and the desire for retribution and revenge.” 

Restorative Justice is not a cure-all.  It may work in some circumstances and not others.  Most often probably, in combination with our current system.  And some people will game the system, because some people game whatever system they are in.  But would that be worse than what we have?  

The whole article, "Can Forgiveness Play a Role In Criminal Justice?" by Paul Tullis,  is here.

What Basic Need Does the Death Penalty Serve for People?

[Monday, March 2, 2008, 11:40 pm Thai time]

Why is this issue important to you?

I’m sure that the desire for revenge is hard-wired into human brains. It’s part of our DNA. If someone wrongs us, we want them punished. But what is different about humans who actively support the death penalty from humans who oppose it?

I don’t know the answer, but as Alaskans once more consider whether to reinstate the death penalty we should be asking people on all sides to look deep into their psyches to search out why this issues is important to them and if it isn’t, why not?

Siri Carpenter, at the American Psychological Associations Monitor cites Phoebe C. Ellsworth, PhD, a professor of law and psychology

"When people have committed themselves to strong support of a position, a position that is ideologically self-defining, of course it is hard to change," explains Ellsworth, "because it would look as though the commitment were not real--as though they are fickle about values they claimed were very important."

Since Ellsworth considered the death penalty 'ideologically self-defining," and since the percentage of Americans supporting the death penalty had dropped from 75% to 60% by 2001, she and colleague Samuel R. Gross, JD, wanted to know what psychological factors accounted for the drop.

The psychological factors Ellsworth and Gross have identified include:
* New information. Strongly held attitudes are more likely to shift when people believe they have new information, in part because they can "save face," even as their views change. In the late 1990s, Ellsworth and Gross maintain, heightened awareness of cases of innocent people being sentenced to death and increasing publicity about DNA evidence in capital cases made the problem of wrongful convictions appear new to many people, leading them to change their attitudes.
* New script. New information about wrongful convictions has been reinforced by a new "script," or way of organizing one's thinking about the criminal justice system.
"Ten years ago," notes Ellsworth, "the idea that you could have someone who was wrongly convicted and sentenced just seemed implausible to many people." More recently, however, stories of incompetent lawyers and of police who ignore alternative leads in investigating cases have replaced people's belief in a fair judicial system and made the notion of wrongful convictions more salient. Ellsworth argues that this new script, or shift in what information is salient, has weakened public support for the death penalty.
* New sources. Prominent republicans, including George Will, Pat Robertson and Illinois Gov. George Ryan, have publicly expressed reservations about the death penalty. Such unlikely sources of opposition to the death penalty have probably helped shift public opinion, Ellsworth argues. As she puts it, "It doesn't identify you as a liberal weenie anymore to say you're against the death penalty."
* New option. In 1997, the American Bar Association called for a moratorium on executions until it can be certain that the death penalty is administered fairly and impartially. And last year, Gov. Ryan announced such a freeze in his state. This option allows people to change their attitudes without betraying their earlier beliefs or appearing to join the enemy, Ellsworth and Gross argue.
Princeton University social psychologist Penny S. Visser, PhD, observes that the social psychological forces that Ellsworth and Gross identify share a common feature.
"In a sense, they provide political and psychological cover for changing a long-held attitude," she says. "They allow a person to maintain--to themselves and to others--that their old position was correct then and that their new position is correct now."

But this is rational stuff. I'm looking for the deeper psychological reasons. Things that cause people to feel strongly and thus push them to act or not act. Things that cause people to change a strongly held ideological stance.

A Gallup Report written by Lydia Saad posted last Novemer 2008, suggests that since 2001 the numbers haven't changed and remain about 64% in favor of the death penalty. She adds that most people do not believe the death penalty is a deterrant. The reason they support the death penalty is what I would call one of the gut level feelings.

Open-ended questions asked in previous years have shown that most Americans who favor the death penalty do so because they believe it provides an "eye for an eye" type of justice.

She amplifies this a bit in the conclusions:

According to a 2003 Gallup study, close to half of Americans who supported the death penalty cited some aspect of retribution for the crime as the reason

Is that what caused Reps. Mike Chenault and Jay Ramras to feel strongly enough to sponsor a bill to reinstate the death penalty?

I couldn't find anything from Jay Ramras on the topic and an email sent last week hasn't been responded to. But Mike Chenault has a statement on his legislative webpage about this bill.

Here are some quotes from it. (I'm excerpting points I think are of interest, not just selecting things to make him look good or bad. You can look at his whole statement at the link above to see if I'm leaving out anything important.)

The impetus for HB 9 really comes from what I view as society's inability to reform or rehabilitate certain criminals.


People who commit the most monstrous of crimes will not have the opportunity to reoffend if a death sentence is imposed.

He agrees with the majority cited in the Gallup Poll above:

I don't believe it's a deterrent to crime, I believe it should be an option for the justice system to brandish against the most heinous unremorseful criminals in our society.

He goes on to talk about a man awaiting trial in Federal Court for "the torture and brutal murder of another woman" who wouldn't be facing a possible death sentence if the Feds didn't have jurisdiction and he had to be tried by the State of Alaska.

He also anticipates a common objection to the death penalty:

No one supports innocent people being put to death for crimes they did not commit. .

Though I would add that some would be less concerned than others if such people were put to death. He goes on to say that

I've included safe guards in the legislation to help ensure that people are not wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death

I appreciate that he’s honest enough to recognize that ‘help ensure’ is the best that we can do here. He doesn’t write, ‘that will prevent.’ Would he lose sleep if an innocent man were put to death because of his bill?

And he's not worried about costs - which is a reason, according to the New York Times, a number of states are looking to get rid of the death penalty.

Another argument against the death penalty is the cost associated with keeping someone on death row. Frankly, I don't believe that cost should get in the way of dispensing true justice.

Now, if I were a real, paid journalist, I would look up Chenault's record on funding rural justice programs to see if he is consistent on this.


But my question is, what is it that deep down motivates people to fight to impose the death penalty when there are so many other important issues out there? People don't usually tell us their deep down unconscious reasons for doing things, mainly because they're unconscious reasons and they aren't aware of them. We have to look at clues. If we want to know what animals went by last night, we can look for tracks in the snow. This is like that, but much more slippery. Rep. Chenault does leave this track in his statement:

As a husband and father, I can tell you that I empathize with people whose families are hurt or killed and they take the law into their own hands. I want this legislation to give Alaskans the confidence that we have a system of justice they can rely on to handle the most heinous members of our society.

I'd rather rely on a system of education, employment, and law enforcement that prevented such crimes in the first place. The death penalty wouldn't bring my family member back.

But I recognize that this certainly gets to a fundamental issue that faces all human beings - that we cannot control everything. However much we might try, we can't control the world, only how we react to it. But not everyone recognizes that.

"As a husband and father." What does that mean?

Here's where things get dicey. I'm going to create a story to explain the above. That's all I'm doing - trying to come up with an explanation. It's a hypothesis, a guess. Read it with that in mind.

The husband and father is, in our culture, as in many others, supposed to protect his family. But when someone violates our safe space and kills a wife or child, that husband has failed in his duty to protect. In addition to the loss of a family member is the guilt one feels for not being able to protect them. And I’d go on to hypothesize that one way that guilt can be assuaged is to kill the murderer - after the fact. The death doesn’t bring back the lost family member, but it shows that I have done my duty by avenging my loved one’s killer. And that may explain why for some people, settling the score is more important than being 100% certain you are taking revenge on the right person. Or perhaps that need for revenge convinces one that this is the right person, even when it isn't. We need to take action. We do. And we don't want to know it was against the wrong person.

I too am a husband and father and I too have thought about my inability to protect my family from things that could happen to them. But I also recognize that life is full of dangers that I can’t protect my family from. I’d rather see us spend money that educates people how to parent better, how to reason better, and how to cope with frustration in non-violent ways. I'd rather see money spent to work with kids as they develop their moral competence so that fewer people are likely to commit heinous crimes.

What do we do with socio-paths? These are the people that Chenault fears - people who have no functioning conscience - who commit the kinds of heinous crimes that Chenault wants to use the death penalty for. These people are ‘morally disabled.’ Most have figured out how to live in society without becoming serial killers. But how do we prevent the Ted Bundy’s? And if we fail, does the death penalty offer "true justice"?

And why, when so many good people die daily for no obvious reason, should I care about saving the life of a killer? Because society intentionally killing someone is different from an individual or a natural phenomenon killing someone. We are better than that.

Perhaps my deep down motivations arise from the knowledge that my grandparents - all four of them - died in Nazi Germany because they were Jews. The death penalty for Jews was legal there. OK, I know some of you are saying, "But, that's a whole different story." I'm not talking here about rational reasons, but about deep down gut reasons. The reasons that cause us to seek out rational reasons to argue for our gut reasons. But I could add rational reasons to that argument if pushed.

Basically, if the question is life over death, and there is any doubt at all, we should pick life. If we put the death penalty off the table, if we take it away as an option, then we can start in on discussions about alternate forms of justice for the heinous crimes that Chenault talks about. And we can, more importantly, talk about what factors in society increase and decrease the likelihood that people will turn to crime. And then ways to dismantle the factors causing crime and supplementing those factors that increase the likelihood that people will become law abiding community members.


Civilization is about learning to curb our destructive impulses when the our instincts kick in. We generally believe that physical fights are not the way to solve problems and it is mostly illegal to hit another person. Even though it may well be a genetic inheritance from the times when self-defense was the only defense. We have constraints on sexual contact as well.

Laws don't prevent everyone from hitting or raping others, but they do establish expectations of how people should behave. And the vast majority of people, most of the time, abide by these limits. Not simply because the behaviors are illegal, but because laws make sense, generally. We have created alternate ways to settle disagreements - not always satisfactorily I acknowledge. (I could write several more posts on the wrongheaded restraining of natural behaviors too - like making young kids sit still for long periods of time when their natural behavior is to be active, or preventing women from breast feeding.)

I think the call for revenge is one of those impulses that society should find alternative ways to resolve. South Africa developed its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Another approach is Restorative Justice which

focuses on restoring the losses suffered by victims, holding offenders accountable for the harm they have caused, and building peace within communities.

And, of course, putting money into prevention as well as intervention would help eliminate much of the need for revenge in the first place. The idea of prevention is found in many fields, including prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault and prevention of school violence, just to name a couple. Lots of tools are out there.

And we know from story after story - whether it is the Hatfields and the McCoys, the Mafia, Palestine and Israel - that revenge often leads to a continuing cycle of revenge.

So, what's in your psyche that causes you to react strongly for or against the death penalty? I don't want to hear a list of rational arguments. I want you to look down deep to see if you can find those unconscious stirrings that get your juices flowing on this topic.

Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone.

The audio is bad, but the video gives a sense of the rush of the media get their story and Browne's love of playing them.



Driving home from the courthouse I heard Aaron Selbig on KUDO saying things like, "I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy whatsoever for Kohring. He violated the public trust, his constituents..." Aaron's not the only one.

Kohring sold out his constituents and the people of Alaska. I have no tolerance for what he did. But he is also a human being. I was sorry to hear Aaron's retributive ranting. I understand the righteous outrage he feels. But Kohring has been tried and convicted and will go to prison. Save that anger for the people who are still out there violating the public trust. Go after them. As I get older, I know that the total lack of compassion Aaron expressed simply perpetuates the win/lose, the us/them mentality that keeps us stagnant as a society. So, if Aaron gets his way, we'll have 'us versus them' Democrats doing the same thing in the state legislature? No doubt retribution is a natural instinct. But as we grow up we learn to positively channel those instincts that still survive in our amygdalas.

I was hoping KUDO would offer an alternative to testosterone radio mired in playground behavior and ideas. Retributive justice as we practice it in the US has gotten our prison population up to 2.24 million people. People that we pay to house and feed. People who aren't contributing to society, aren't working to help restore their victims. What's wrong with our society that we have such a relatively high percentage of our population in prison? KUDO should be asking these bigger questions and exploring alternatives like restorative justice. We should be figuring out why people have taken this path, how to divert people starting on that path, and how to help the Kohrings learn to give instead of only to take. Selbig wasn't modeling the kind of behavior we'd like Kohring to have. And, yes I realize that there are some people who will never be rehabilitated and we have to find ways to keep them from harming others. There are psychopaths out there. But they didn't choose to be born without a conscience any more than the rest of us chose to have that part of our brain functioning.

Having sympathy for a human being who is hurt does NOT mean one excuses that person for the wrongs he has committed,. Instead of lashing out at him for our own faults we may see in him, or because we can't deal with people like him who directly affect our own lives, or whatever reasons, it seems more practical and decent to recognize that we too are fallible; that we should deal with the Kohrings who directly affect us. Not through safely beating up on already injured person, but by taking more control of our own lives. Aaron use those stones to build something not to pick on a man who is already down.

Words Indians don't translate when speaking English

These are words I noticed at the conference and later on tv and in newspapers. (There were several earlier posts - poverty conference,, , other conference shots. conference) These are Indian words (I guess Hindi, though the same or related words show up in other Indian languages.) I'll try to give a little explanation, but my knowledge is scanty and these are based on what I understood people to be explaining and some internet checking - mostly on wikipedia. So don't take any of this as absolutely certain, but rather as a starting point.


Lakh (sounds like 'lock')= 100,000

Crore (rhymes with 'roar') = 10,000,000 (100 Lakh)

Panchayat - Village council - elected by the villagers. They make decisions about village matters, including settling disputes. This came up in the conference because many Indians go through the Panchayat instead of the court system because, as we were told at the conference, the court system is millions of cases behind. One speaker said that understanding Eternity was easy once you've been through the Indian court system.

Jirgas - The Pakistani equivalent of the Panchayat, though I think these are made up of village elders who may not be elected. While some cases have brought international condemnation of jirga decisions, conference attendees argued that millions of decisions are made regularly that generally satisfy both parties. Some conference presenters talked about restorative justice as an alternative to retributive justice. Instead of punishment being the object, making the victims whole is the object. However, when the discussion got to Jirgas, making the victims whole included things such as: A male member of the family has murdered someone. To make the victim's family whole, a sister of the murderer is given to the victim's family. One presenter, a very articulate Pakistani attorney, argued that this does not come from Islamic law, but from tribal law. Such verdicts have caused Jirgas to be outlawed, but they still exist and fill an important need.

Dalit - A members of "backward castes" including untouchables and some low caste peoples. The caste system continues to survive in people's minds and while there are affirmative action type laws that set aside seats at universities,etc. for dalit, there is still a long way to go.