A Review of Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal
When is state-sanctioned violence justified?
Of all the issues that are at the heart of the 2024 presidential election—immigration, inflation, foreign wars—one that is both central and overlooked is criminal justice. How could it be otherwise? One major party candidate is a multi-felony convict scrambling to stay out of the crosshairs of federal and state prosecutors long enough until he can call off the dogs. The other is Kamala “Kamala-is-a-cop” Harris, Madame Prosecutor, reassuring voters that what she lacks in political experience, she makes up in knowing “his type” and how to lock ‘em up deep behind bars.1
Coincidentally, it was during this election season that I read Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal, by Matthew T. Martens, a book that raises troubling concerns about how our federal, state, and local governments wield their monopoly on violence against the American people.2 Turning our attention away from the highly visible topics of criminal justice (the use and abuse of police power, the conditions of prison facilities, the prosecution of political figures), Reforming Criminal Justice brings Christian doctrine to bear on the sorts of injustice that goes on behind the doors of local courthouses and interrogation rooms in blue and red states across the country.
Martens’s book is almost two books in one, fitting for an author who has both a distinguished legal career and an M.A. in biblical studies. The first half of the book explores the question of what a Christian ethic of criminal justice looks like. He grounds his answer in just war theory, a theological doctrine going back to Augustine and beyond, that establishes rules for when a Christian may be justified in using violence against another. “Like just war theory,” Martens writes, “a Christian theory of criminal justice seeks to reconcile the claims that
physical violence is morally wrong;
governments have a moral duty to protect their citizens from injustice; and,
to protect their citizens from injustice, governments sometimes need to use physical violence.”
The crux of the dilemma, then, is to know when “sometimes” means “this time,” when the Christian prohibition against violence is outweighed by Christian demands that criminal penalties be inflicted on a creature made in the image of God.
That dilemma is resolved in a single word: love. As Martens’s articulates, the primary goal of his book is “to reclaim the biblical conception of justice as an act of love.” Of course, already readers might be wary that Martens is going to try and tell them that the answer to the evils of the world is a Barney-like hug and maybe a slap on the wrist. But as Martens argues, love is not an alternative to justice; it is the very thing that justice demands. “Justice is giving people their due, and what we owe people is love”—even if that love entails locking them up and throw away the key. After all, rather than being inimical to love, “punishment can be an act of love by communicating truth…To punish is to make a statement that the conduct being judged is wrong, and the severity of the punishment imposed is a statement about the seriousness of the wrong.”
Still, love demands that we be meticulous in meting out that justice. A criminal justice system motivated by love provides protections to individual dignity and rights that other justifications for criminal punishment, like rehabilitation or deterrence, might trample on. Quoting C.S. Lewis, Martens points out that if we justify locking someone up as a way of “rehabilitating” them, we might justify inflicting cruel and unusual penalties all in the putatively noble goal of “curing” them. Loving our neighbor who is accused of a crime, on the other hand, restrains power by refusing government the right to treat individuals, however heinous their actions, as a means to social ends.
But what does a criminal justice system grounded in love even look like? Through an exegesis of biblical legal doctrine and Christian ethics, Martens delineates five principles: accuracy, due process, accountability, impartiality, and proportionality. These principles are not just abstract ideals but strict guidelines against which we can measure government action. Accuracy and accountability, for instance, demand that we uphold rigorous evidentiary procedures and pursue “all reasonable means” to ensure that we don’t convict the innocent, while impartiality demands that we do not unduly favor or disfavor individuals based on wealth, race, or creed.
After 200 pages of ethical reasoning, you might assume that Martens would be ready to wrap it up, but he has only gotten started. Part One was Martens the theologian laying out legal doctrine; Part Two is Martens the prosecutor bent on convicting the American criminal justice system for failing to live up to that doctrine. Step by step, Martens explains both how the criminal justice system works—how a law passed by legislatures becomes enforced by police, prosecutors, and judges—and how that system inflicts injustices every day on the accused and convicted. Here are some of the shocking realities of that process that jumped out at me:
The United States has 4.5% of the world’s population, and 20% of the world’s prison population.
40% of all murders in the U.S. go unsolved, while over 1000 of murder convictions have since been exonerated.
95% of all criminal cases are resolved through guilty pleas (and 24% of all convicts who have been exonerated since 1989 were convicted on guilty pleas).
The accused in most states do not have a right to an attorney until after they have entered their plea.
There are often half the number of public attorneys in any given state that the caseload would demand.
Though prosecutors are required to share evidence with the defense, prosecutors have “absolute immunity” to any civil charges against them for hiding that evidence during their prosecution.
Of all these troubling truths, the ones around plea bargaining, speedy trials, exculpatory evidence, and mandatory sentencing were the most sickening, especially for the way that they coordinate their powers against the accused. Consider how, if you are arrested, you will likely face two no-win options. Option 1: plead guilty, which will often come with a demand that you waive your right to “Brady evidence,” meaning that you cannot challenge your conviction if it comes to light that the prosecutor was hiding exculpatory evidence. Option 2: plead not guilty, and wait in jail for weeks or even months (depending on whether you can scrounge up bail) for your “speedy trial,” during which you might be charged to the hilt for having the gall to invoke your right to that trial. If you lose, be prepared for those maximum charges to include one with mandatory sentencing that will land you in prison for many, many years.
At the heart of Martens’s book—throughout and directly in the middle, in a brief interlude on the history of American criminal justice—is race. While Martens notes that “the failings in the American criminal justice system go well beyond race,” he repeatedly points out how racial discrimination, prejudice, and inequities are at the source of so much of American injustice, from white-only juries to the disproportionate use of the death penalty against black convicts. Written in the wake of the summer of 2020, Martens is clearly responding to both the Black Lives Matter movement and to the backlash that it provoked. On the one hand, his emphasis on Christian ethics and procedural injustices pushes back against that movement’s largely secular, police-centered focus, but his insistence that you cannot solve American injustice without reckoning with American racism also counters the implicit complacency of those who responded to 2020 with some version of “all lives matter.” Martens’s book offers a triangulation to this seeming binary of a culture war, inviting skeptics and critics of the police to attend to all that is overlooked but un-Christian about our criminal justice system.
If you, like me, are more familiar with Latter-day Saint devotional literature than Christian ethical treatises, you’ll appreciate how Martens rigorously deploys scripture and theology to reckon with real-world problems. If you, like me, learned about our judicial system from childhood viewings of A Few Good Men and Matlock, you’ll appreciate his blow-by-blow account of what actually happens to the accused from the moment they are arrested to the moment they are sentenced. And if you, like me, want to understand a crucial current event in a new light, you’ll appreciate Martens’s challenge to all of his readers to look unflinchingly at a system that we both applaud when it keeps us safe and that we turn a blind-eye to when it does so at the expense of the civil rights of our brothers and sisters. Highly recommended.3
UPDATE: The podcast that introduced me to the book shared some listener comments who gave pushback to Martens’ contributions. Worth a listen.
In general, a lot of the pushback came down to: the criminal justice system is not broken, prosecutors and police are too easily demonized, and much of the system’s flaws stem from being under-resourced. The point out that the plea-bargain statistics can be misleading—high levels of plea-bargaining can be a sign that prosecutors are prosecuting cases where guilt is largely indisputable. Fair enough; not something I had considered closely enough. I still think defendants need a lawyer before they plea, though, and they need shorter times to trial.
In other words, I agree strongly with the under-resourced part point. I don’t think the takeaway from Martens’ argument should be “defund the police” or be more merciful to criminals. What we need is not more mercy per se but more justice—but justice that is more exacting and demanding, on behalf of the criminal and victim alike. That means more police officers to enforce the laws and to make it harder to avoid punishment (which, as I understand it, is a stronger form of deterrence than harsh punishments—it certainly is for children!), more public defenders to make sure those arrested have a fair shot at trial if necessary, more jails to ensure that prison conditions are dignified, more court systems to ensure a fair and speedy trial, etc., etc. As one of the listener said, crime is job number one for a civil government. The key is to take crime seriously without losing sight of civil liberties. I’d like to think we could do both.
Apart from the candidates themselves, there’s Hunter Biden’s plea deal, Robert Hur’s decision not to prosecute Biden, the “abolish the police” movement that launched from Tim Walz’s backyard, etc.
I learned about it from one of my favorite podcasts, Advisory Opinions, which specializes in recapping and analyzing news and decisions from the federal court system.
Originally, I was going to combine my review of Martens’s book with a review of Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze, which is about the ballooning amount of law and regulation that suffocates our democratic spirit, constitutional structure, and civil rights (and which was also discussed on Advisory Opinions). The book makes for a nice companion to Martens’s because it explores, among other things, the criminal enforcement powers of federal agencies that are, perhaps, even more unjust and more overlooked than even the criminal due process violations that Martens lays out. But while I found the book to be persuasive and interesting, I didn’t feel much like writing about it. Still, recommended.
Wonderful post. I was thinking of writing something like this (though on the topic, not this specific book) for Wayfare and here you've already got a wonderful start. Have you read Adam Miller's Original Grace? If not, I recommend checking out that (very brief and readable) book as well.