Restorative Justice Essay Example

English

What is Restorative Justice? And who can go with it instead of capital punishment? Restorative justice is a kind of justice that concentrates on the requirements of the victims and the offenders, along with the involved community, rather than satisfying legal rules and principles or punishing the offender. It’s different from criminal justice, because the ways in which people view the crime and ask questions are different:
“Rather than asking the traditional justice system questions of what law was broken? Who broke it? How should we punish criminals? what harm have been done? What needs have arisen? Whose obligation is it to meet those needs?” (Miller 73).
With that, the restorative justice tries to rebuild and fix the harm done instead of punishing the criminal to death or sending in prison for life.
Amitava Kumar has shown his astonishment in the essay “The Restoration of Faith” about the working of restorative justice, and he came up with a question to Sujatha Baliga, director of NCCD's restorative justice project, about the gang-rape of a young female in a bus moving in Delhi. Baliga’s reply was outspoken:
“Restorative justice is a voluntary process, and is best when driven by the desires of the victims; the victims in this case have been clear – the woman from her deathbed, and her father now – that they want the death penalty. The family has said they don’t want to see the young men who did this. So this is not an appropriate case for restorative justice.”(74)
Kumar has mentioned the story he read in the New York Times about Ann Margaret Grosmaries, a 19-year-old girl that was murdered by her 19-year-old boyfriend, Conor McBride, who shot her during a fight lasting 38 hours. What made the story unusual were Ann’s last words for her family, “forgive him”. That means the young man would not be put to death or imprisoned for life. The killer knew his fault very well and said, “What I did was inexcusable. There is no why, there are no excuses, and there is no reason” (73). The Grosmaries forgave Conor but why? Kumar quotes a New York Times columnist that Grosmaries forgave Conor for their own sake, not for his sake (74). The Grosmaries forgave Conor for Ann’s sake; she wanted them to forgive him for what he did. Actually, it was hard for them to make such a decision but they accepted it anyway. Ann’s parents hired a lawyer named Sujatha Baliga to help them out with decreasing the sentence. At the end of the case, the judge gave him a choice of 20 years imprisonment plus 10 years probation or 25 years in prison.
In my view, I cannot allow making such a choice if I were in their place, even if it was for the victim’s sake. Conor killed a human being for a silly reason, and he should get full punishment. For example, in my country, Saudi Arabia, the law would punish murders with public execution with no exceptions, unless the family of the victim wants to forgive the killer, and most likely they won’t forgive murder. I strongly disagree with the Grosmaries’ decision. I believe that their decision was based on injustice for two important reasons:
Firstly, this guy is a criminal. He must have to stay in prison away from people or to be put to death, because if he goes out free in the near future, he might do the same thing again. Most people in prison have a criminal record and did more than one crime. If you think about it, they did a mistake. Only few of them change to become a better person.
Secondly, it’s no good for him to leave the prison after 20 years. He would have no family or friends by that time. Everyone would try to avoid him and stay away from him due to his criminal record. He would become unwanted in the society. No one will accept him, and he would not be able to get a job due to criminal behavior. He would become an untrustworthy, unwanted, and hated person. In that situation, he might get frustration and anger that may result in committing another crime such as stealing or raping.
In conclusion, I can’t see how restorative justice can give help in murder cases. Proponents say restorative justice is to fix the harm done, but if a person has been killed, there would be nothing left to fix. The life of someone is valuable and shouldn’t be taken easily. Some people are of opinion that capital punishment is of no use. They say that if a murder takes a life of someone, how could taking the murderer’s life fix this? Where is the good on that? First of all, the point of capital punishment is to make people aware that killers won’t be taking it easy, and they would end up dead or in prison for life. There are some people, who don’t value the lives of human beings, but they won’t even dare to take a life of someone because they don’t want to break the law and end up dead or in prison. Secondly, you can’t fix this by capital punishment, but you will make sure that there would be no more harm to be done from this murderer. Yet, restorative justice can be useful in most cases such as sexual assault, fighting, stealing, fraud, and many more such cases, but not with killing. It has to be considered that there is nothing more important than the lives of people.

Works Cited

Miller, J.S. Acting out Culture: Readings for Critical Inquiry. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2014. Print.