I heard the story on the radio a few weeks ago as I dashed around town running errands and hoping a Verizon tech could resurrect my Blackberry. NPR’s All Things Considered was reporting on the resolution of a forty-five year old case in Alabama.
I turned up my car radio as Debbie Elliot reported that former Alabama state trooper James Bonard Fowler had pled guilty to second degree manslaughter for fatally shooting Jimmie Lee Jackson in 1965 outside a café in Perry County, Alabama. Jackson was a young civil rights activist and his death galvanized the movement that then marched from Selma to Montgomery. I hardly need report that Fowler is white and Jackson, black.
I’m no expert on this period of our country’s history and had not been following the story, so while commentators expressed mixed feelings about the anticlimactic sentencing—Fowler was sentenced to six months in prison, in part due to his failing health at age seventy-seven—I was arrested by the personal element of the story.
As a part of the plea bargain, the judge asked Fowler to apologize to Jackson’s family, including the slain man’s daughter and sister, who were present in the courtroom. Fowler did so, but as the prosecutor told NPR, “the family would’ve liked for him to have looked at them when he said it, but he was looking at the judge when he said it.”
I thought of that family, who waited more than forty years for legal action to be taken for the killing of their loved one. Years were spent longing for acknowledgement of wrong-doing, of their pain, of the injustice of the death of this young man. I can only imagine the added sting of knowing that this white man could take away the life of a young black man without consequence, even decades after the marches, sit-ins and bus boycotts were over. How they must have wondered—perhaps just in fleeting moments– if what they had gained in the civil rights movement was worth the death of one loved most dearly, especially if his death would never see justice.
As I read more of the story later, I began to see Fowler as a person as well. Here was a man who had lived most of his life with the guilt of killing a young man he says he never meant to kill. Even if he did act with intent, he is now an old man, frail and human, haunted by the wrong he has done. Would six months in prison erase the pain of the Jackson family, much less expunge the guilt of Fowler? As Jackson’s daughter, Cordelia Bllingsley said, “this is supposed to be closure, but there will never be closure.”
Weeks before hearing the story on the radio, I sat in a lecture hall to hear Pat Nolan of Justice Fellowship speak about restorative justice, an alternative means of responding to acts of crime that has at its aim restoring criminals to society while also addressing the harm caused to the crime’s victim. Restorative justice is only effective in instances when the perpetrator is penitent. It involves the victim in the sentencing process, giving the victim the opportunity to confront the person who has wronged them; the offender likewise has the chance to offer sincere apology to the person harmed. For both parties, this process gives a face to the other. The criminal and victim both see each other as human beings and recognition gives way to empathy. Sentencing is then decided in a mediation-like setting with the aims of making the price meaningful—that it actually addresses the harm experienced by the victim—and even restorative. In many cases, the sentencing outcomes of restorative justice procedures include measures that will ultimately help the perpetrator re-enter society as a rehabilitated individual.
And so I turn again to the long awaited trial and sentencing of James Bonard Fowler. Why did this fail to answer the cry for justice? Why was there no closure? What went wrong? If we look at these people not as symbols of our nation’s moral failings, but as individuals who have caused harm and been harmed, what do we see? A daughter who grew up without a father, who now feels that her fatherlessness has not been acknowledged. A remorseful old man who can’t undo his sins. Could restorative justice have resulted in a different outcome? Perhaps Fowler would have looked the Jackson family in the eyes as he apologized.
For a moment, I fight my own tendency to think, “who cares how these people feel? The court has decided that this is justice and they just have to live with it.” And that’s true. By the standards of our legal system, justice has finally been done in the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson. But is anyone satisfied? The outcome has addressed which law has been violated, who is responsible and how we should punish them, but the victim has been entirely left out. In any case that ends in a guilty plea, victims like Cordelia Billingsley have no voice in the court room.
What if our justice system treated both victim and perpetrator as human beings and acknowledged that far more is broken than a statute? Suppose we considered who has been harmed and to what extent? What if we were concerned not with punishment, but with holding the responsible party accountable to make things right?
I suppose the question that matters here is how we define justice. Our current system will prevail as long as we define justice in terms of punishment for a law broken, rather than as holding a person responsible to right the harm they have done to others.
It’s not a matter of being tough or soft on crime, but of whether the consequences acknowledge the wrongs done and even in a small way, right them. Responding to a criminal act should not require us to shed our capacity to see others as human beings. Restorative justice requires imagination, the possibility that wrongdoers could be rehabilitated– the dream that victim and perpetrator could actually reconcile. It’s a dream worth having.