​​Justice Denied Is Love Denied

An Ongoing Conversation

You have heard it said that justice delayed is justice denied. But I tell you that justice denied is love denied. And love denied to either the crime victim or the criminally accused is justice denied. This, I hope to persuade you, is not merely my view but also Christ’s.

In recent years, long-simmering racial tensions have been forced to the surface in the context of our criminal justice system. The series of deaths of Black children and men, often at the hands of police, some caught on video, usually by smartphones, have been streamed into living rooms across the country and even the world. The names of many of those men and boys have become part of our cultural lexicon: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Elijah McClain, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Patrick Lyoya. Their killings, and the resulting protests, have birthed slogans that provoke passion on all sides: Hands up, don’t shoot. I can’t breathe. Law and order. White privilege. Systemic racism. Black lives matter. Blue lives matter. All lives matter. Merely to recite these names and phrases is to invoke events and stir accompanying emotions.

If you’re reading this, I assume it’s because you have some interest in the ongoing national conversation about criminal justice. Perhaps your natural tendency has been to approach issues of this sort as a political conservative or political liberal. That’s not surprising, as criminal justice is commonly thought of as purely political or ideological. Maybe you’ve never thought about what it means to approach criminal justice from a religious perspective. Or you may have wondered what the Christian view is on the issue, but you’re at a loss to discern what Scripture has to say about it. I want to show you that the Bible does speak to the issue of criminal justice and that the root of the biblical concept of justice is love.

I write this as someone who is both seminary trained and has practiced law for more than twenty-five years. The focus of my study in seminary was historical theology, and that experience embedded in me the simple but vital truth that I am neither the first nor the smartest person ever to read the Bible. We risk serious error if we approach the Scriptures and the Christian life without a firm grasp of the teachings of believers who have come before us.

I also draw on my own experience and training as a lawyer. Most of my time as an attorney has been devoted to the practice of criminal law. I spent more than nine years as a federal prosecutor and spent slightly longer as a criminal defense attorney. As a prosecutor, I worked in various ways on numerous capital murder cases. As a defense attorney, I represented an accused murderer. I have handled virtually every type of criminal case imaginable on one or the other side of the “v.” And throughout my quarter century as a lawyer, I have spent a significant amount of time thinking about what it means to practice criminal law as a Christian.

Be Informed

As I’ve watched the national conversation concerning criminal justice play out among evangelicals in recent years, I’ve observed two roadblocks to meaningful dialogue and charting a way forward. First, many of the loudest voices on this issue are not particularly well-informed about how the American criminal justice system operates. The resulting discussion has not been a critique, or even an analysis, of the features of the criminal justice system. Instead, the focus has been either on the system’s inputs or on its outputs. By this I mean that much of the criticism of our criminal justice system has revolved around statistics about either crime or incarceration rates.

Some participants in the criminal justice discussion focus on the fact that violent crime rates in the United States are unusually high compared to western Europe. In 2020, there were an estimated 22,000 homicides in the United States, or approximately 6.5 homicides for every 100,000 people.¹

By contrast, the homicide rate that year was 1.4 in France, 1.0 in England, 0.9 in Germany, 0.6 in Spain, and 0.5 in Italy.² Likewise, the rates of other violent crimes (rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft) in the United States were generally much higher than in those countries.³ And the combined arrest rate in the United States for these crimes is only about 10 percent.⁴ From statistics like these, some argue that what the United States needs is a tougher approach to crime control.

Other participants in the criminal justice conversation focus on what has come to be called “mass incarceration” and, in particular, the racial disparity of the American prison population as compared to the population at large. The United States is the world’s largest jailer, as others have frequently observed, accounting for approximately 19 percent of the world’s prisoners but only 4.25 percent of the world’s population.⁵ Even removing all drug crimes from the calculus, our country has the highest incarceration rate among Western countries by a wide margin.⁶ And the percentage of Black people imprisoned in the United States is five times higher than that of White people.⁷

These jarring statistics about the justice system’s input (crimes) and output (imprisonment) are certainly relevant to the conversation. More telling, in my view, are these statistics: 40 percent of murders in the United States go unsolved while, since 2000, 1,039 men and women have been exonerated of murders for which they were convicted.⁸ Thousands of guilty wander free while more than a thousand were wrongly imprisoned. This suggests that something in the American criminal justice system is broken.

What the Bible teaches is that justice is an act of love.

But these statistics cannot tell us what is broken. To answer that question, an analysis of the design and operation of the features, procedures, actors, and laws that make up the system is required. We need an examination of the machinery, not merely the product, of the criminal justice system. We need to understand how the system was intended to function, and we need to inspect how it is actually running. Are the justice system’s outputs a by-product of a machine that has malfunctioned (or worse, has been designed to function) in an unjust way? This analysis has been largely missing from the evangelical conversation. In fact, it’s been mostly missing from the secular national conversation too. Conducting the needed analysis to make a competent diagnosis requires an understanding of how the machinery of criminal justice operates and why it operates that way. What happens at the various stages of a real-life criminal prosecution? Whether the system is just can only be answered with that factual understanding.

Christian Ethics of Criminal Justice

Which brings me to a second roadblock I have observed—namely, that much of the discussion occurs without reference to a comprehensive Christian ethic of criminal justice. Rather, much of the current Christian engagement on this issue sounds more like political talking points than a biblical framework. To be sure, reference is made here and there to Scripture’s teaching that we are all made in the image of God. And that is a relevant theological consideration. But it is not alone sufficient.

The criminal justice system is, by definition, state-sponsored violence. Every criminal law, even a just one, is an authorization for the state to use physical force against an image bearer if he or she fails to comply with the law’s mandate. Most Christians do not believe that the Bible either forbids or condemns such violence. It is expressly sanctioned by Scripture in several passages, the most notable of which is Romans 13. This means that the sight of the criminal justice system at work, even in entirely appropriate ways, will be often violent. And viewing physical force brought to bear on another human is upsetting. What is disturbing, however, is not always unjust.

The question that has largely gone unanswered in the dialogue concerning criminal justice reform is what biblical framework we should employ in evaluating those uses of governmental force. A few writers have offered an ethical framework for the remedial and punitive goals of the criminal justice system.⁹ I have yet to come across any resource that attempts to offer a Christian ethical framework with which to evaluate the system’s day-to-day operation.

I hope to demonstrate from Scripture that justice is, most fundamentally, an issue of love. What the Bible teaches is that justice is an act of love. That which is loving is no less than that which is just. As professor Christopher Marshall, a leader in the restorative justice movement, puts it, “Love requires justice, and justice expresses love, though love is more than justice.”¹⁰ For the Christian, love is an issue of the highest order. It is foundational to the Christian ethic. Love is—or should be—of utmost importance to Christians because it is of utmost importance to Christ. The implication of Jesus’s teaching is that everything about life turns on love (Matt. 22:37–40). And justice is no exception. Get love right, and you will get justice right. But you will never set the justice system straight without a proper understanding of love.

This article is adapted from Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal by Matthew T. Martens.

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