Just Deserts for Dessert

 

A jury decided that Amber Heard committed 10.3 million dollars of defamation on actor, Johnny Depp, and that he in turn inflicted 2 million dollars of defamation upon her. If you followed any of this, you might well have concluded that together they defamed humanity for a great deal more than their judgments added, multiplied by whatever number you choose to pick.

Had their moms been in the jury box instead of a seven barely-interested citizens, it wouldn’t have surprised me if both got sent to their rooms, got grounded for a year, with words like apology, honesty, reconciliation, truth and humility prominent in their release-from-mom’s-house-arrest documents.

I’m fascinated by the meaning of justice, from the age of Old Testament prophecy through the medieval, then the Renaissance and the modern eras to the present. Old Testament justice takes exception to using false weights and measures in trade and bearing false witness and trying (fruitlessly, I might assert) to enforce compliance with cruel and unusual penalties for breaking laws: Leviticus 20:10 decrees that both parties to an adultery shall be killed. 

In fact, a trip through Leviticus reveals a justice system heavily weighted toward defending a peoplehood against contamination by foreign, idol-worshiping neighbours, and in the stoning of miscreants, an ancient iteration of the firing squad in which the people register their support for the justice of the punishment by participating in its execution. Generally put, criminal justice in Leviticus is based on the “life for a life” principle: should you happen to shoot a neighbour’s prized Holstein mistaking it for a moose, fairness says the neighbour is entitled to your prized Jersey. There’s some restorative justice in that, alongside an arguably good way to make justice fair.

How the jury came up with the differential in the dollar value of one defamation compared to the other is well beyond me, except that it caters for a sensibility of how much each of the combatants could have earned had they not been defamed … where Depp’s loss would arguably be greater than Heard’s.

I listened to some of the cross-examination of Heard by Depp’s lawyers. I saw video of the Depp idol worshippers outside the courthouse cheering every blow upon a woman obviously struggling with some serious mental issues, crying out to see her blood spilled, her entrails hung in the public square. To say more than this about that would be well above my pay grade, but I saw little of justice in the outcome, possibly because Depp’s “this jury gave me my life back,” seemed to miss the obvious corollary that he gained his monetary, star-life back at the expense of hers.

If that’s justice, it certainly isn’t the kind the prophet was talking about in Micah 6:8, where the admonition to “do justice” is followed by “love mercy” and then “walk humbly.” A closer look at most criminal and civil court “justice” so often displays an underlying assumption that justice must be stern and unflinching, and give no nod to mercy or humility or any other signal of weakness. We tend to like our justice adversarial, not restorative.

A truck driver fails to stop at a crossing and this failure results in the death of sixteen hockey players, the driver and coach and many more injured. We’d be right, I think, in assuming at the outset that restoration to a previous state for those involved is simply impossible, while at the same time, acknowledging that there is no eye for an eye, Levitical- or Sharia-like “justice” to be applied here: the driver cannot be flayed, mocked and crucified sixteen times. But how many years of incarceration would smell enough like justice? And if he and his family were deported to a country from which they fled in hopes of a better life, would that help to satisfy the thirst for justice? Or are we talking about retribution, revenge here?

In the Depp/Heard civil court trial, justice—or its lack—was measured in dollars and cents. That Depp said the judgment in his favour gave his life back is a reminder that injustice touches much more than the pocketbook: dignity, standing, self-respect, reputation, for starters, and assigning dollar value to any of these is very tricky. The value justice systems place on intangibles is telling: that Amber Heard has no money to pay the settlement, was shown by evidence to be truth-telling unreliable, (possibly a compulsive inventor of “truth”)  yet “fit to stand trial,” none of that figures in the judgment and indeed, can’t. To be restorative in the case of estrangement between Hollywood marriage partners, of course, invokes the question, “which of this person’s marriage arrangements are we supposed to be arbitrating here?” To speak of justice in an unjust, capitalist-consumerist environment is another story, but highly relevant in most every case where justice is being sought.

Food for thought: CoSA is a program meant to prevent reoffending by persons released from prison after a sentence for sex crime. Circles of Support and Accountability, it’s called and it’s largely funded through local donations and the federal government. CoSA has had to lobby hard for continued federal funding and is facing pressure to do with less and less support from that source. The principle of restorative justice is central to CoSA; statistically, it’s been highly effective in reducing recidivism among released sex offenders. Read about it here.

Some would say that the switch from eye-for-an-eye to adversarial to discovery to restorative justice is the central theme of the New Testament. I tend to agree. Isn't "being reborn" itself an acknowledgement that I've been a recipient of undeserved reconciliation, restoration? A justice borne of mercy? 

"You can't beat a child into behaving gently." -Klavier Onk