The third annual Charles S. McCoy Memorial Lecture on Religion, Ethics, and Public Life, delivered on April 10, 2006, by Judith W. Kay, Associate Professor of Religious and Social Ethics, University of Puget Sound

I am honored to have been invited to deliver this lecture in memory of Charles McCoy, with whom I had the pleasure of studying. It's gratifying to see three of his daughters here, former colleagues, and many former McCoy students who carry on his legacy. The last time I spoke in this chapel was at the invitation of Charles; he was leading services that day and asked me to participate. So speaking here, today, has doubling rich meaning for me. If you knew Charles, you may recall that he rarely spoke without mentioning the concept of covenant and his beloved daughters. Although I'm not quite adept enough to work them into this afternoon's discussion, as a way of honoring Charles' legacy, I will weave covenant into the theme I was asked to address—punishment and redemption. I am indebted to Charles, among other teachers here at the GTU such as Bill Spohn, Carol Robb, and Marty Stortz for shaping my sensitivities to a covenantal view of justice.

A covenant should enable every person to be fully human. When a human is murdered, this covenant risks rupture. A murder tempts three parties—the surviving family, the wrongdoer, and the community—to abandon the covenant.

First, surviving family members risk becoming temporarily blind to the humanity of the victim and the killer.

Second, murderers have already violated the covenant by brutally denying the victim's humanity, but are at risk of violating it further by identifying themselves with their worst vices.

And third, bystanders in the community are at risk, because we will be sorely tempted to close our eyes and hearts to surviving family members and to speedily push perpetrators from our midst.

Covenantal justice recognizes there is no true retributive justice after a murder. No amount of revenge or retribution will bring the deceased back to life. Communities have tried boiling offenders in hot oil, drawing and quartering them, isolating them, or loading them with psychotropic and lethal drugs—but the precious victim that once was, will never live again, and all the punishments in the world won't ever make that right. At a recent conference on the impact of the death penalty on victims' families, a panel of family members, representing positions both for and against the death penalty, said angrily that closure is a word they want confined to a list of things never to utter in their presence. Why? Because the death penalty can never balance the scales of justice.

Covenantal justice maps out a different path than retribution. It marks a journey with the destination of restoring people to their own humanness and reawakening their responsiveness to others. This path requires mending the divide between surviving family members, offenders, and bystanders. The journey is hazardous. Each party to the crime—survivors, those who harmed, and communities—faces a maze of exit ramps and detours in which they can become trapped. Some never find their way back to connection to themselves or to others.

My goal this afternoon is to help you decide, with me, to close off some of these detours and exits that falsely promise justice. In order to recognize these choices as dead-ends, we need first to understand the conveyor belt that sweeps most of us toward them unconsciously.

This conveyor belt is a story. It is a way of viewing ourselves and the world that makes certain choices look right, despite the overwhelming evidence that having tried them for the past 3000 years, they really do not restore humans to their birthright of connection.

How do we come to internalize this story? I'm sure it's not through taking my course on the ethics of punishment at the University! Rather, most of us come to our ideas about punishment by living in communities shaped by a shared story.

What's the story that we tell?

That some people are born bad. "Painful punishment steers the wayward in the right direction.... People...learn useful lessons from having punishments inflicted upon them.... Suffering pays for wrong.... "Revenge is a natural...response." But now, in our civilized condition, only the state may punish wrongdoers. Why may the state kill its own citizens? Because some of people deserve it. Suffering makes good, says the story.¹

This story informs practices within families, religious institutions, and schools as well as the criminal justice system. These practices seek to reward the virtuous and punish the vicious. We learn early that when someone fails or is bad, they deserve whatever harm comes their way.²

Unfortunately, these practices impose bad habits. Due to thorough conditioning into this story, we come to believe that certain people do deserve harm. That "doing unto others as was done unto you" is a fine moral guideline.³

By the time we are teens, we have internalized this story that has been reinforced with painful discipline—it seems intuitively right to us. Most Americans believe that retribution is the only form of justice, as when they say after an execution, "justice was served" or "justice demands a life for a life." This story dominates this country's understanding of the death penalty. In a 2000 Gallup poll, 53% of those surveyed cited retributive reasons for their support of capital punishment (even while indicating they don't like the word retribution).⁴

I call this story the "narrative of the lie," because it misleads us about the true effects of its practices on victims, wrongdoers, and communities.⁵ Instead of revealing the truth that retribution fosters vices, the story would have us believe that painful penalty is redemptive. How so? We will explore how the death penalty promises to redeem the victim, those who have killed, and the community.

I. First, let's explore how the story promises to redeem the humanity of victims through violent punishment.

Technically, within retribution there is no place for the victim. Remember that the state sees itself as the victim; the state prosecutes because its laws were violated. Nevertheless, under pressure from victims' rights advocates, the state in recent years has been asserting that capital punishment has the therapeutic benefit of bringing closure to murder victims' families.

Despite that fact that no one has ever defined closure or studied what it meant, the term began appearing in the media during the 1980s.⁶ By 2001, in a poll conducted by ABC/Washington Post, 60% of those surveyed agreed with the following statement: "The death penalty is fair because it gives satisfaction and closure to the families of murder victims."⁷ 60 %. That's what the story promises.

Notice that the story does not promise covenantal justice. It says nothing about helping us see the victims as whole persons; helping people such as Timothy McVeigh come to grips with their vices, or helping bystanders develop discerning vision, enabling them to see both McVeigh's humanity and his cruel confusion.

The McVeigh trial was a watershed moment in the U.S., because the relatives of the 168 victims couldn't seem to get their stories straight. One survivor, a grandmother who lost two grandchildren in the bombing, clung to the story's promise that the death of another would cure her victimization. Other survivors, such as Bud Welch, had warned her that the execution would not bring her the satisfaction that the state promised. He and others flatly denied that the execution would honor the memory of their loved ones. But, in the grip of the retributive story, she remained convinced that another's death would be her means of redemption.

As you may recall, after Terry Nichols had been sentenced to life in prison at the federal level, the prosecutor in Oklahoma City promised his constituency that Nichols would face capital charges at the state level. But, this second trial also did not result in a death sentence for Nichols. After his life sentence was announced, the grandmother was receptive to the suggestion by other survivors that she should contact Nichols directly. Gathering her courage, this grandmother wrote to Nichols, "angrily confronting him with her pain and loss, calling him every name in the book. To her surprise, Nichols wrote back, expressing his apology and remorse. Her second letter was just a tad less angry than the first. The correspondence continued. Now they have a friendly interchange."⁸

The grandmother will be the first to tell you that her healing and her sense of justice were helped tremendously due to this correspondence with Nichols. Now, she deeply regrets that since McVeigh is dead, she can't confront him and seek accountability from him. Ironically, "the death penalty has become an obstacle, not an aid," in her journey to repair relationships. Bud Welch reports that "over half—over 50 percent—of the Oklahoma-City-bombing families have become disillusioned with the death penalty."⁹

The story-line that violence offers redemption to victims needs to be rewritten. But where did this story-line originate? Why did humans ever think that retaliating against those who have harmed us would make things better?

Friedrich Nietzsche speculates that inflicting pain on someone was first used as a threat to make contracts binding in societies predating the ancient Near Eastern law codes. The creditor, he argues, needed a way to make the borrower honor his debt. If the debtor couldn't repay the loan, he could be forced to pay instead with his property, his flesh, or with his life. The creditor, Nietzsche argues, would be repaid in the pleasure of mastering another, in the pleasure of dominating and subduing someone else. One's financial loss could be made good by demeaning another. In time, harms to humans were placed into this economic framework. A murder victim could be redeemed by killing the offender.

Within class societies, one's worth depends upon one's class rank. Therefore, affirming the worth of the victim means that the worst punishments are reserved for those who kill the more valuable victims. In the 1700s in this country, killing a slave was not a crime, and for a long time our de facto policy was that the only good Indian was a dead one. Within the crazy-making story of retribution, the only way such victims could be redeemed was to demand harsh punishments. One knew one had "arrived" once the state was willing to punish on one's behalf.

Lest we think that the democratic west has banished classism from our courts, it remains true that the severest punishments are reserved for the most valuable victims. In the US, where race still reflects class, blacks (and other people of color) who murder whites receive the death penalty much more often than blacks who kill other blacks.¹⁰ The book Dead Man Walking recounts the case in which a white man is convicted of murdering a young white couple. The defense lawyer explains to Sister Helen that this crime reflects racism. How could this be, she asks, when all the players are white? The lawyer explains: The white defendant wouldn't be on death row if he had killed a black couple.

Nietzsche did not investigate the origins of taking satisfaction in another's suffering or of establishing worth by lowering another, but he should have.

From the perspective of a covenantal affirmation of our common humanity, three prior hurts have to be inflicted before people could take pleasure in mastering another. First, people would have to be subjugated, a deep wound. Second, people must be hurt further by not hearing this subjugation condemned as wrong. Third, their healing must be interfered with.

Only in a class society would the vice of finding pleasure in securing one's own worth by lowering another be seen as "natural." And class societies deny that subjugation is painful. Retribution has its roots in the false promise that dominating another can cure the wounds of classism.

Covenantal justice does not dignify "doing unto others as was done unto you" as either natural or virtuous. Against Nietzsche, it is a vice to base one's worth on the ability to lower another. That is the first vice fostered by the death penalty and its story. The second vice is seeking satisfaction through subjugation of another—of thinking that such satisfaction is a good form of repayment.¹¹

We condemn these attitudes as vices in criminals. People are motivated to resolve their own painful past by appealing to the same mantra as the state: "Do unto others as was done unto you." Offenders seek release for their own pain by degrading another, just as the state encourages families to do. Don't we find abhorrent murderers who take satisfaction in the suffering of their victims? Don't we deem such homicides aggravated? Murderers—rather than being moral misfits—have internalized the story and acquired its vices. Retribution does not offer a different way of doing things, but reproduces the very vices of the criminal and of the criminal class system.

These two vices—gaining status by wielding coercive power and then taking satisfaction from it—interfere with the formation of covenantal right relationships. No one's true, human worth is established by degrading another. Victims' families only seek this solution because their genuine needs for healing have remained unmet. What are these needs?

• Survivors need to tell their story to caring listeners over and over. Painful emotions of rage, grief, and terror take decades to work through.

• They need to be permitted to shed their tears and pound the ground for as long as they need. Although their losses are permanent, emotional healing is possible. People can recover from having been victimized and regain the humanity that the covenant promises them.

• Murder leaves a yawning hole in the world of surviving families, whose lives are altered forever. They need a truer story than retribution, which will help them integrate their loss into their ongoing life narrative.

• They need to hear that no human being ever deserves harm, especially their loved one.

• They may wish to confront the wrongdoer with their pain.

• Their healing is advanced enormously if they receive an apology in which the wrongdoer acknowledges her wrongdoing.

• They want further violence prevented. Thus, they want to secure a commitment from the wrongdoer to deal with whatever is inside her, so that she won't harm anyone else ever again.

In the absence of healing and a truer story, victims are offered only one story and one option—painful penalties. We ought not to be surprised, then, that families often channel their rage and grief into securing the ultimate sentence. But it is important to understand that they only do so in light of injustice: the failure to meet their genuine needs.

When healing is blocked and the narrative of the lie prevails, a third vice is fostered: victimhood. "Being traumatized...is different from having a habit of victimhood.... Victimhood involves perceiving every new event and circumstance through a distorting lens that denies real power." Rather than take responsibility, people blame others. "Blame thus is counterpart of victimhood.... People rarely blame another unless they had lost a sense of their own power and ability to act with consequence. This lost sense is a lingering effect of unhealed helplessness."¹²

Capital punishment can reinforce the habit of victimhood in homicide families. Only one percent of homicides ever result in a death sentence.¹³ This means that 99% of homicide survivors will never receive the closure the story promises. Families whose killers receive a death sentence are encouraged by prosecutors to remain fixated on their anger and to define themselves in terms of their loss. Victimhood, thus, is the third vice or exit in which many victims get lost.

A fourth vice is fostered by retribution: moral blindness.¹⁴ Many family members cannot put the murder scene from their minds. "Trauma rivets" their attention upon the deceased as a victim, not as a whole, human person.¹⁵ "Bill Pelke's 78-year-old grandmother, Ruth, taught Bible lessons to neighborhood children in Gary, Indiana." On May 14th, 1985:

Four ninth-grade girls come to her door asking about the lessons, and she invited them into her home. As she turned to get the information for them, one grabbed a vase and hit her over the head. Another pulled a knife out of her purse and began to stab her. Ruth was stabbed a total of 33 times. While one of the girls held the knife inside her, the others ransacked her house. They ended up with $10.00 and her ten-year-old car. A year later, one of the girls, Paula Cooper, was sentenced to death for the crime. She was fifteen when the murder occurred, and at sixteen, became the youngest female on death row in America."¹⁶

"Bill Pelke recounts how he could only picture his grandmother, Ruth, stabbed with such force that the floorboards splintered under the carpet where she lay. He recalls that it was ‘the same room where our family celebrated Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, birthdays, and other joyous occasions.' Shock temporarily shuts downs the mind, restricting vision." The full humanness of the victim is temporarily lost to view...with tunnel vision, [he only saw her] murdered body.¹⁷

Initially, Bill was "supportive of Paula's death sentence."¹⁸ "It should be expected that murder throws some people more deeply into the narrative of the lie." Their narrow vision is "fueled by a focus on the murderer by the criminal justice system, the media, and abolitionists. Everyone knows the names of Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, but few can name their victims. After the murder, the victim's life, achievements, and humanness are snuffed out a second time."¹⁹

However, there is no need to interpret the experience of trauma through the lens of victimhood; indeed, some families who emerge from their wounds realize the essential truth that the murder had nothing to do with their beloved as a person. Some family members eventually abandon the vice of victimhood.

For Bill Pelke the shift in perspective "came when he was at the end of his rope. A crane operator at the Bethlehem Steel Company, one day Bill had arrived before his fellow workers. Alone in his cab, sixty feet above the plant floor, he recounts:

‘My life had been unraveling, and now it was in complete tatters.... I felt so hopeless that I decided to pray, which is something I hadn't done in a long time.

As I prayed, I started to get this image of my grandmother and what she stood for. I began to think of Nana's love of Jesus, and then thought about all the things that Jesus had said about forgiveness. I felt like Nana's spirit was speaking to me through the prayer.... [B]ut the problem was that I did not have an ounce of compassion for Paula. I sat in the crane, not knowing what to do, with tears streaming down my face, and I begged God to please, please, please give me love and compassion for Paula Cooper.'"²⁰

If you have ever experienced an inability to connect with your own feelings of compassion, you know how much Bill was suffering. After sobbing from the desire to connect to his own heart, and then sobbing some more at the sheer possibility that he might feel something beside rage, Bill made a decision.

"'I decided...I could share Nana's faith with Paula. As soon as I made this decision, I no longer wanted Paula to die.... [N]ow I had an image of [Nana] alive—vibrant and filled with love.'"²¹

After this emotional healing, Bill's vision expanded. "He could remember Ruth other than as a victim"; she had been a terrific woman with a story that should be told. His vision thus restored, Bill suddenly realized that Paula was more than a murderer. She too had a past and story to tell. And if she had a past, she should have a future. At that moment, he could no longer support her pending execution.²² "Bill...began corresponding and visiting with [Paula], and worked to overturn her death sentence. She is now serving sixty years in prison."²³

Survivors such as Pelke can reclaim their own humanity and that of the victims, and killers without condoning the crime and without minimizing one iota of the damage. In this model of covenantal justice, Pelke was able to vindicate Ruth's value by responding positively to the inherent worth of Paula. This achievement is the covenantal justice model of redemption.

II. Second, let's explore those who have taken a human life. How is capital punishment supposed to redeem killer's souls, to help them recognize just how wrong what they did was?²⁴

The heart of justice is responsiveness to the other. Immanuel Kant's justification for punishment rests on this idea—respecting offenders' dignity and rationality requires responding to them. If people were allowed to get away with murder, not only have we failed to honor their victims, we have also failed to respect the criminals as moral agents. I would go further: offenders need our response; this is a basic human need.

But retributive justice cannot convincingly provide the answer to the following questions: Why must that response be painful? Why must we kill murderers in order to demonstrate our respect for their dignity?

The story says that punishment is meant to bring miscreants to their knees, to humble them, to reduce them. Punishment should force prisoners to recognize the equality of their victims.

But in reality, an involuntary object of violence—a quivering human being—does not experience violence as salvific. Rather, violence dulls the senses and shuts down intelligence. Painful penalties do not lift the veil from prisoners' eyes and suddenly enable them to see the humanity of their victims. Instead, violence—as we saw with victims' families—can narrow the vision. Wrongdoers are already trapped in tunnel vision, in which they are unable to see either their own humanity or that of their victims. This tunnel vision is a result of a brutalizing process in which their confidence in their own goodness, or that of others, slowly got pounded out of them. ²⁵

One death-row prisoner, Jim Elledge, with whom I worked for two years, suffered from this dimness of vision. At the time of his second murder, Jim was on parole for a first murder in which he had bludgeoned to death a hotel clerk with whom he had gotten into an argument. Jim had been abandoned and brutalized almost his entire life.

• His beloved sister died from a botched tonsillectomy; his older brother assaulted him frequently; his mother descended into alcoholism and his father into mental illness.

• On his own by the age of twelve, he was forced to sell himself sexually in exchange for food.

• Eventually, he was placed in a group home. One day, a cauldron of boiling hog's fat accidentally tipped over onto him. In the hospital the next day, he concluded that God was punishing him for a bad thought he had had.

• Jim's belief in a punishing God who condones violence never wavered.

• He had internalized the view that bad people deserve harm.²⁶

Violence is a vehicle of conditioning. When not allowed to heal from such wounds, the violence becomes encoded in rigid, behavioral habits. Such vices reproduce violence. So, forty years later, when humiliated by an ex-girlfriend, he concluded she was a bad person who deserved harm. Isn't that what his family, religion, and prisons had engrained in him all those years? While killing his former friend, Jim was completely blinded to her worth as a human and completely disconnected from himself.

The story says violent punishment will make wrongdoers "recognize the error of their ways.... It will "correct" them and set them on the right course.²⁷ But, the threat of death did not contradict Jim's view of the world; instead, it corroborated it. Given the story of redemptive violence to which he clung for meaning, Jim was certain that his execution would bring satisfaction to the victim's surviving brother and would make good in God's eyes. He found a lawyer who mounted no defense. He banned mitigating evidence during the penalty phase of his trial. Once on death row, he waived all rights to appeal.²⁸

Jim never stopped believing in the redemptive power of violence—he lived by it and he died by it. Jim would have been the first to argue that violence can transform people in a positive direction. "It didn't work for me," he had told me, "only because I am so bad." Morally blind to his own humanness, how would being threatened with death help him see it in others?

The story says that punishment will enlarge prisoners' capacities for compassion, because they will finally understand what it means to suffer. But, violent punishment interferes with moral accountability. It "'gives urgency to" one's own survival and "self-interest." ²⁹ Jim became preoccupied that the state should give him what he wanted—an execution. In a trembling voice, he would tell me that if the state did not kill him, his rage would know no bounds. Rather than expanding his scope of caring, despite his deep remorse, Jim remained focused on his own welfare. Violence limits the capacity for responsiveness—it has a deeply anti-covenantal character.

Many religions recount the good outcomes of certain violence. Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ falls into this category. Jesus' execution is interpreted as the direct will of God. State-sanctioned violence is God's chosen means of salvation.³⁰ Jim believed in this version of the atonement. For someone as bad as him, only death could be transformative. Hence his preoccupation with suicide; since he lacked the courage to do it himself, he had to murder, so that the state would deliver the death he felt he deserved.

In contradistinction to this version of the atonement, theologians such as Rebecca Parker and Rita Brock seek to offer another, in which God is not seen as sanctioning "‘cruelty and torture.'" One in which inflicting violence on others is neither ""edifying nor transforming," they write. In their view, Jesus' execution by the Romans should provoke condemnation of the cruelty of an unjust empire.³¹ Capital punishment should be denounced as a violation of God's will for God's children.

The story says that threat of death removes the prisoner's moral blindness, so that she can see just how wrong what she did was. Yet at the very moment of execution—which is supposed to awaken the murderer—the execution team engages in a distancing ritual that deadens them to the suffering of the person in their hands. The death penalty renders the humanity of the prisoner invisible, thus fostering the very vice of moral blindness it seeks to condemn. Capital punishment doesn't transform or awaken anyone. Violence blinds us all.

A researcher in Liverpool, England named Shadd Maruna decided to contrast life-time, career criminals who desisted from their lives of crime versus those who persisted in crime. His subjects had extensive prison records and many years of criminal acts, often involving drugs and armed robbery. He began his study with the common-sense view shared by the prison staff that he would find that the criminals who had successfully gone straight had finally faced reality and owned up to their immorality. Maruna observes that "Shaming offenders has reemerged as a leading paradigm in correctional practice"; "much therapy is "intended to break through an offender's hardened shell of rationalization and coerce the person to accept responsibility."³²

Maruna made two startling discoveries. First, the criminals who made good did just the opposite of what the story demanded. Rather than agreeing with the script that they were truly deviant, defective, or sociopathic, instead sang a different tune: they had a core self that was good from which they had become cut off.

One representative subject said: "It was just that, um, I realized that the entire thing had all been an act, my entire life, all me criminal offenses, all me drug taking, it was all a sham.... [But] I am who I am now, who I've always been inside. I've always been intelligent, right, inside.... But it was always wrapped up in so much shit it couldn't get out."³³

Unfortunately, the prison guards found such statements to be a sign, not of a progress toward rehabilitation, but the opposite—a refusal to accept shame. Maruna observes: "The inmate...believed he was a good person [and] he did not perceive this to be an error.... [But] clinging to this belief that he was essentially a decent person was deemed erroneous [by the prison staff] and further evidence of how deeply ingrained his criminal thinking was."³⁴

Successful ex-convicts clung to a different view of reality; that is they had a real self capable of good, despite years of ruinous choices.

Second, Maruna discovered another attitude that distinguished those who made good from those who did not. Successful ex-convicts held the perspective that they were powerful moral agents. Initially, they came by this perspective from an outside source. Many clung to a letter from a former teacher or girlfriend who insisted that they had what it took to turn their lives around. At first borrowing others' confidence in them, they eventually saw themselves as undetermined by their past and able to make different choices. This perspective that they were powerful helped them give up the vice of victimhood, which they had formerly used to blame others.³⁵ Significantly, offenders needed assistance from outside to go from saying "I am a bad person" to saying instead, "I am a good person who struggles with the temptation to do very bad things." And to go from saying, "This is just the way I am," to "I can change my life around."

Covenantal justice means helping prisoners to dismantle their vices in order to become law-abiding citizens. This is what redemption should entail.

III: Third, covenantal justice asks: How does violent crime pose a risk to bystanders' commitment to act humanly?

Abolishing the death penalty is only the first step. We face the much harder task of undoing our own allegiance to the narrative of the lie and its vices.

We have made progress. "Whites no longer lynch African-Americans at the rate of three per week and celebrate the deed by passing around souvenirs taken from the burnt body. Vast numbers of lives are improved because this one despicable practice ended. Yet practices of punishment—including the death penalty—in the U.S. partake of the same mind-sets and cultural practices that supported lynching. The techniques of execution may have changed, but the vices have not."³⁶ Even if the death penalty were abolished next week, you and I still have a lot of homework to do. We would still be left with a highly punitive, retributive system that punishes more and more of our citizens in the blind hope that it will keep us safer and make them better.

"Justice is a two-way street," argues philosopher Jeffrey Reiman.³⁷ The offender owes the community, but the community also owes the offender.

Let me conclude by giving one small example. Criminologist Lonnie Athens studied violent offenders and the process of violentization they undergo. A series of social experiences—much like Jim underwent—are necessary before someone becomes willing to seriously harm another. One of the most critical moments in this violentization process involves the community. Athens observes that people emerge from brutalization confused, bewildered, angry, and searching for meaning. Why have I been the victim, and what can I do to escape this fate? Some resolve that the next time they are seriously threatened, they will use violence rather than be a victim again. Most often, they will engage in a violent performance against their primary brutalizer.³⁸

In Jim's case, in lay in wait until his older brother returned from the army. When his older brother tried to rough him up, Jim, by now a buff teenager, was ready. He recounted his first victory using violence with enormous satisfaction.

However, whether the former victim's first assault ends in a loss, win, or draw does not determine the person's future violent path. Decisive, argues Athens, is the community's response. If community members label the newly-violent person as bad, treat him with trepidation, and say—of the person who until yesterday had never been violent—"You know, I always thought he looked evil," the offender is encouraged to identify with his vices. He now sees himself as a victimizer, saying to himself: "Since I acted violently and they say I'm violent, I really must be violent." On the other hand, if community members ignore his violent habits, they exhibit a different kind of moral blindness. Unable to see the depth of his wounds and his struggles to do the right thing, the community makes excuses and fails to intervene effectively.

In order to regain our humanness, we bystanders need to see both the humanness of the offender and his vices abandons the person just when he most needs to be reminded of who he truly is. In a symbolic way, the community needs to gather round and throw all of its weight behind the wrongdoers' humanity, while simultaneously holding him responsible for his actions and helping him dismantle his vices. We need to discard our allegiance to the story and start acting from the commitment that human being deserves harm.

Covenantal justice means stepping off the conveyor belt of the story that lies, and to forge a new path based on a truer story about how violence hurts humans. As a community, we need to put roadblocks up at the all the exits we know make no sense, and that entrap people further in vices such as moral blindness. And for those who we haven't been able to prevent from getting lost down the side streets of violence and revenge, covenantal justice requires that we refrain from blaming them for having lived out the story. As we work to remove the scales from our own eyes and the chains from our own hearts, then certainly we can figure out how to do this for surviving families and those who killed their loved ones.