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What Is Justice for Lockerbie?
Scotland freed the terminally ill Lockerbie bomber last week so he could die at home in Libya. "Our beliefs dictate that justice be served, but mercy be shown," a Scottish official said. Did Scotland do the right thing? Should we have any mercy for mass murderers who are terminally ill?
I have hesitated to comment on the release from Scottish prison of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, because there is no clear moral line that I can see. The facts are well known, and by now most people have made up their minds. But on what grounds? Of the 270 people killed in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, 189 were U.S. citizens. Libya didn't formally admit to planting the bomb, yet the Qaddafi regime has paid $2.7 billion in restitution to the victims' families. Despite the assumption that the attack must have involved any number of conspirators, only Megrahi was convicted. He has always proclaimed his innocence, and some of the victims' families believe him while others call him a mass murderer.
All the moral choices are cloudy and tangled in this case. When the Scottish secretary of justice decided to grant Megrahi a release -- the prisoner is in the final stages of advanced prostate cancer -- he cited "compassionate grounds." Even though Megrahi showed no mercy to his victims, the secretary said, Scotland was bound by its own values, which include mercy, not the values of the convicted criminal. This seems like a position Christians would endorse, but in the U.S. the teaching of "forgive your enemies" hasn't prevented avowed Christians on the right from being among the strongest advocates of the death penalty and harsh sentences for drug crimes. In a sense the justice secretary was using the term mercy in a very narrow sense. Pure mercy would have been not to send Megrahi to jail, an abhorrent choice to most people -- even Jesus speaks on both sides of the issue in the New Testament. Forgiveness is clouded by other references to punishment, both divine and secular. At one point Jesus even says, "I bring not peace but a sword." In many places he has no tolerance for sinners. Yet there's no doubt that forgiveness stands out as a major tenet of the faith.
So what is justice? On religious grounds an eye for an eye settles the matter for millions of devout believers, while others struggle between mercy and vengeance. That's why secular society has turned justice, for all practical purposes, into a technicality of the law. Whatever the law says to do, that is just, even when the law changes (thus the debate over the death penalty in this country has gone back and forth several times, with yes and no standing for justice if it happens to be in force). How are laws made? With great fickleness, depending on the public's mood, recent events, political ideology, legislative horse trading, racial and class prejudice, and religious tradition. The ideal of making the punishment fit the crime has been achieved only sporadically, and there are stretches of history, as when the courts upheld that escaped slaves should be returned to their masters, when the law has sided with gross immorality.
If I've described a tangled situation, it also happens to fit reality. It was more realistic for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to wash his hands of the Lockerbie controversy and give it back to those in Scotland who made the decision than for President Obama to issue a blanket condemnation. The public doesn't agree, however, since as so often happens, those who cry for vengeance the loudest tend to win the most support. There is another path. Instead of wrestling with flawed choices, you can go deeply into how justice affects you.
As bystanders to tragedies like the Lockerbie disaster, you and I have no moral weight; we are outsiders. But we aren't outsiders in our own lives, where we face moral choices that are just as tangled as this one. When you go inward with honesty and clear sight, you see in yourself all the elements that clash here: mercy, anger, compassion, revenge, high-mindedness, impartiality, bias, and fairness exist side by side. Just this realization brings you out of the illusion that justice is simple. Then you have a choice to empathize with everyone concerned, and step by step you arrive at the ancient principle of non-violence as a living part of your own consciousness. Having achieved that stage, daily situations will look very different from how they look now. One sees that Jesus wasn't really contradicting himself -- a universal empathy allowed him to feel what it was like to be both the judge and the condemned. Until you and I expand beyond the narrow limits of our own consciousness, our moral judgments will be very imperfect. Seeing this, you can't help but stop judging other people so quickly, and at the same time, the desire to reach higher consciousness grows stronger, because that is the only way out of impossibly tangled questions.
By
Deepak Chopra
|
August 27, 2009; 8:03 PM ET
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Posted by: Stax2020 | September 5, 2009 7:56 PM
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my feeling is in life there are sometimes no one size fits all method of deciding anything... the ideas of consequences 4 actions, penance, rehabilitation, remorse or ever restitution and forgiveness, in the spiritual realm, are all amorphous, or imprecise since there is no direct contact with desired presence or ideals. What one thinks sometimes depends upon whether one is the one doing the forgiving or the repenting and all the different roles and circumstances which when dealing with oneself or relatives or friends seem at times to be different from others perceptions. I feel Jesus was very clear on mercy and forgiveness not through works but through grace... that said i think most people understand you cannot be given grace or forgiveness unless you genuinely seek and genuinely have the internal contrite heart and broken spirit the bible talks about. My experience is people who fake it ...don't make it. I think in a lot of our penal codes we incarcerate the wrong people. There truly are people society needs to be protected from and some that both society and themselves need to be protected. Protected from doesn't mean kill i don't think here i think God was pretty plain when he gave the rules to Moses. The idea of life in prison or a hospital should in some cases i think be that. There would seem to be other people who if not incarcerated would be of little risk of actually harming somebody else again. a person who is dying would seem to be a low risk of hurting others in some situations. I will disagree with the one poster that the dead people are the only ones who could forgive. I think forgiveness is for the living most likely
Posted by: artistkvip1 | September 1, 2009 11:23 PM
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Nauseating.
Ambivalent motivations do not bear on the moral options before us - only on our ability to select the best one.
If he weren't hanged, he should at least have been jailed for life - and yes, even til his death, however it might have come.
Instead, for cheaper oil we have sold ourselves to those who would kill us. Lol, to those who DID kill us. Again. No wonder our enemies show us so little respect.
Ryan Haber
Kensington, MD
Posted by: withouthavingseen | August 30, 2009 1:29 PM
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There goes the guru of pop with some gobbledygook.
According to latest reports in British press, Megrahi's release came about as part of a deal between the UK government and Libya. Libyans agreed to permit BP to explore for oil.
See
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6814974.ece
Posted by: probashi | August 30, 2009 11:38 AM
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Releasing the Lockerby bomber Ali al-Megrahi was stupidity, mistakenly masked over with the cause of mercy.
Yes, Jesus requires us to forgive our enemies.
He does not, however, require us to embolden them to do it again.
Ali al-Megrahi has been proven in a court of law, however flawed our laws are, to have been involved in the bombing. Therefore he is dangerous to all other children of God.
Is it merciful to the world to release a criminal, and by that act, embolden our enemies? No it is not.
Is it merciful to take care of Ali al-Megrahi’s cancer while we hold him in prison to protect the world from his murderous ambitions? Yes it is.
If they didn’t release him, would the Muslim radicals use that as a cause to make him out to be a martyr? No doubt, but that battle we are already fighting. By releasing him we just made that battle worse.
God has made it clear that governments have the right to make laws and enforce them. But these same governments are bound also to follow the guidelines of Jesus.
The Scottish government said that they must release him because their laws require them to show mercy. In concept that is a good law, but it has been improperly applied. They were showing mercy right up until they released him.
I believe a major error has been made.
Mark
Always seek the truth.
Posted by: volkmare | August 29, 2009 11:24 AM
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High-minded indeed, the discussion on higher-consciousness and forgiveness. Difficult for me to grasp, the very rarefied air of these, in my fallen and ignoble state. Indeed.
As I seem to recall, those who are actually in a position to make these decisions regarding forgiveness and compassion are dead.
Two-hundred-seventy of them.
.
Posted by: T-Prop | August 28, 2009 1:29 PM
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The comments to this entry are closed.
Yet again, another American media source that cannot be bothered to research Lockerbie and understand the growing body of evidence that al-Megrani was wrongfully convicted. Go read www.justiceforlockerbie.com and then pass comments.