NEWPORT CATHEDRAL
MAGISTRATES 650TH ANNIVERSARY
30TH JANUARY 2011
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Readings: Exodus 20 vv 1-20
Colossians 3 vv 12-14 & 23-25
Matthew 22 vv 34-40
The house in which they lived was built in the early part of the 20th century. Although it had been modernised to some extent, the fireplaces and grates in some of the bedrooms had never been removed. It was about 3 o’clock in the morning when the sleeping 12 year old boy was awakened by the sound of someone opening the door and entering his bedroom. He lay very still. Because of the night-light on the landing just outside the door he was soon able to make out and recognise the figure of the elderly man who walked across the room, urinated in the fireplace and who then left to return to his own bedroom.
The 12 year old boy in this bewildering incident was me; the elderly man, my Grandpa, physically fit as a flea but living out what Alan Bennett, writing in his diaries about his mother calls the ‘flat unmemoried days’. Like her, my Grandpa had Alzheimer’s. He had lost his way to the bathroom and had probably forgotten what he had done seconds after he had done it.
The reason that I relate this story is to tell you what happened later when I told my grandmother what had happened and asked ‘Why did Grandpa do that?’ More specifically it’s to tell you the answer she gave to my question, because it has remained with me for the rest of my life and it is something upon which I often reflected during my time as a defence solicitor plying my trade in the magistrates’ courts of this town and sometimes further afield.
My Grandmother said ‘Grandpa’s not in his right mind.’ Although I recall that particular use of those words very vividly, I also recall them being used in one form or another quite regularly in the face of the challenging, unusual or even offensive behaviour of others which was considered to break the boundaries of what was acceptable: ‘They’re not in their right mind.’ ‘He / she can’t be in their right mind.’ The magistracy deals regularly with such people.
It probably existed in some form before 1361, but it was in that year that the term ‘Justice of the Peace, J.P., was first used. The magistracy has continued to evolve, moving on from the days when its members were drawn exclusively from the male, property-owning classes and from the days when they were caricatured as ‘middle-class, middle –aged and middle-minded’, to the present day when its membership is drawn from a wide range of walks of life and where intelligence, common-sense, integrity and the ability to be fair-minded count more highly than property owned or bank balances accrued. With some courts lined up for the chop, evolution in the name of efficiency of course, continues. Whether this is for better or for worse is not for today
But today’s magistracy – the people who comprise it - is something of which we ought to be proud and proud to celebrate, not least because of the commitment and public service which those people, individual magistrates and benches, demonstrate in disposing of a vast volume of work. The bulk of this is, of course, the 95% of all criminal cases which pass through the judicial system of England and Wales, not to mention the delicate and relatively more recent jurisdiction exercised in certain family matters. It’s the exercise of that criminal jurisdiction I want to explore primarily.
And, as we celebrate all those who deal with this work and bear a burden of trust that they will do so decently and with principle, I want to suggest that they could do worse than using our little family maxim as a starting point when considering how best to approach and deal with many an individual or family who stand before them, especially when dealing with those whose behaviour has broken boundaries of acceptable behaviour. ‘They’re not in their right mind’.
I suggest that the readings carefully chosen for this service encourage such an approach:
The reading from Exodus, the giving of the law, the 10 commandments, beloved by so many and all too conveniently reduced by some to being 10 suggestions, summarises hundreds of rules and regulations found elsewhere in the Old Testament. It lays the law down, dictating how, for their own good and for the well-being of society, God’s people should relate to one another as well as to God himself. And there is a clear and accurate implication that breaking the rules now can have consequences which blemish the good name of families from one generation to another. Mud sticks.
That law laid the foundation of many of the legal systems of nations and states today, and is crystallized in Jesus’s response to the lawyer’s provocatively clever question in the passage read from the Gospel according to Matthew. Matthew has recorded how Jesus has demonstrated what keeping the rules of love means in practice. In doing so he had shamed the rule-obsessed Pharisees and Sadducees, those who had an unyielding tariff for every breach of the rules, a tariff which took little or no account of frailty of personality or disadvantage of circumstance.
Matthew’s Jesus is ready to take account of both, and to deal with people as he found them, not as they ought to be or how the self-righteous expected them to be. He knew that even people who were not in their right mind had potential, possibilities, and they were always welcome at the table when Jesus was the host. They were the risky, raw material which he loved, warts and all, and with which he took risks to work. God’s image in them might be marred or spoiled, but this was a reason to take risks in trying to restore that image rather than count it as gone for good. Nobody, in the Lord’s eyes, was or is a lost cause.
And such risks, directed at restoration and rehabilitation, are to be commended and are worth taking whenever possible when it comes to dealing with those who come before our courts today. And why? It’s quite simple. It’s because they are our neighbours. Neighbours just as much as are those against whom they have offended. And we are commanded to love them as we love ourselves. To deal with them as we would wish to be dealt with ourselves. ‘You shall love the Lord your God and your neighbour as yourself.’
Our passage from Matthew has something of an expanded parallel in Mark’s version of the Gospel, but neither Luke’s version of the Gospel nor John’s contains a parallel. Luke’s version, however, is the one which most challengingly sets out just what loving a neighbour can demand of us.
Again, it’s a lawyer who provokes a response from Luke’s Jesus, probably one of the best known in all of the New Testament, the parable of the Good Samaritan, where Jesus teaches that anyone however different, however challenging, however disgusting – and remember that this is just how Samaritans and Jews viewed each other – is our neighbour and has claim on our mercy. At the end of the story, he commands that this mercy be shown. ‘Go and do likewise.’ Know who is your neighbour; know what it is to love your neighbour, and do it.
Developing that principle leads us inevitably to the point where we must accept that even those who offend, however challenging they may be, are our neighbours and the neighbours of all who pass judgement on them, just as much as those who are offended against. And just as one must rarely justify or risk letting wrongdoing go unpunished, one equally cannot justify or risk disposing of the one guilty of that wrongdoing as if he or she had no inherent worth.
As did our reading from Exodus, our reading from Paul’s letter to the Colossians states clearly that wrongdoers can expect to be paid back. Nobody in their right mind will argue that crime should go unpunished; but, as W. S. Gilbert’s ‘Mikado’ has it, the punishment should fit the crime.
Paul challenges us to recognise that, in truly clothing ourselves with love means being prepared to demonstrate, among other things, compassion, kindness and forgiveness in dealing with the wayward for we ourselves are not perfect. Appropriate retribution there should be, but attempted rehabilitation there should also be. So, the punishment that fits the crime should fit the criminal too, and it doesn’t always do so.
I can vividly recall, for example, never being able to quite see the sense in a court as I saw it pointlessly, apparently thoughtlessly and apparently without compassion, imposing a financial penalty, usually the tariff, upon a smelly and bedraggled woman convicted of shoplifting some children’s clothes from Mothercare, when a social inquiry report, written by a highly respected probation officer and uncontradicted in any respect, revealed, in graphic and grim detail, the desperate financial circumstances in which that woman was living and urged the court to offer her support by imposing a probation order. The report had not made excuses for her crime it suggested reasons, not least among them:
· grinding poverty,
· single parenthood following abandonment by her partner,
· zero self respect and self-esteem,
· a desire to give her child the best
· little or no educational attainment and
· minimal aspiration -
all, incidentally, characteristics generally to be found when the lives of those who populate our prisons are subjected to research, and possibly all guaranteed to drive individuals further out of their right mind than they might already be.
Added to this, of course, is the fact probably most relevant to my theme today, namely that the vast majority of the tens-of-thousands detained in custody have, to a greater or lesser extent, some form of diagnosable psychiatric or psychological disorder. They are people medically recognised as not being in their right mind.
Some people, sometimes called the ‘hangers and floggers’ will caricature the employment of merciful considerations in the realm of the administration of justice as evidence of woolly-headed liberal thinking rather than the courageous and correct, if sometimes risky course which I believe it to be.
However, to pursue this a little further, if one were to ask one of them who was in danger of being either hanged or flogged, punished for some transgression or another, whether or not they wouldn’t rather like one of those woolly-headed liberal thinkers to show them a bit of mercy, I have little doubt about what their answer would be. Nor do I have much doubt that, in mitigation for what they had done, they might not say something along the lines of ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.’ They might even say, ‘I wasn’t in my right mind.’
Nothing can better teach one the value of properly understood forgiveness or demonstrate the nobility of mercy than wanting and needing to receive either oneself. None of this is hopelessly idealistic thinking nor is it impractical. It may be challenging, but I respectfully suggest that it is also decent and neighbourly.
There will, I guess, always be new initiatives which, to step back a few years in the political calendar, seek to be tough on the causes of crime:
· sentencing guidelines will continue to be drawn up and changed;
· justice secretaries will continue to bring forward what they say are creative measures which they genuinely believe will contribute to rehabilitation;
· the restorative justice programme will, I hope, gain wider acceptance;
· the monetary cost of keeping people locked up will continue to escalate and, hopefully, become a driver for looking at alternatives to custody and which have the real potential to work.
Equally, there will always be people, still our neighbours, who for their own sake and the safety of the public need to be detained; there will always be those who, however hard others try to help and guide them, will be unable to stay off the slippery slope of regular re-offending; but there will also always be those who, given the opportunity and the love which we would prize, will respond positively
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None of them, none of us fails to some extent, great or small, to mar the image of God in our words or deeds. None of them, none of us, is ever entirely in our right mind. And there will probably never be enough money, enough people, enough training even enough loving commitment to address the manifold ills which are the root causes of crime - which, of course, means that crime will always be with us.
All that being so, as you celebrate and give thanks for the evolution of the magistracy and for the contribution which it makes to public good and public order, and as you recognise the privilege of sharing in its life, I pray that you will recommit yourselves to recognising also the trust which that privilege brings with it to try, in all circumstances, to deal creatively and hopefully as well as effectively and justly with those neighbours of ours who, were they in their right mind, would not be in front of you at all. AMEN