1. Atonement and Justice
Calum Crombie

2. I read the papers the next day, and they said things like, “Justice was done!” and “We got another one of those criminals!” Everybody in Louisiana and their cat was for the death penalty in 1984.
Sr Helen Prejean

3. Justice is blind, and everyone is equal in the eyes of the law.

5. “Go show yourself to a priest” Matthew 8:1-4

6. Back to the Square

7. Back to the Square
It is easier to send away a monster than a son, a daughter, a mother or a father. Evil comes closer if we see it in human beings compared to if we relate it to monsters. It is tempting to send the monsters away from society. There is only one problem – monsters do not exist. Man is capable of good and evil. In the death and resurrection of Christ, God also enters the myth which says that some humans are monsters in order to Demythologize it.
Magnus Abrahamson, Back to the Square, IPCA conference paper, 2017

8. Back to the Square
I don’t mean to make Pat Sonnier a hero — he had committed an unspeakably terrible crime, and I was horrified at the crime — but he was a human being. Is human dignity only for the innocent? Is there not dignity in a guilty life?
All human beings are worth more than the worst thing we’ve done in our life; is that not the message of Jesus to all of us?
Sr Helen Prejean

9. The Right to Hope
‘Those who commit the most abhorrent and egregious of acts and who inflict untold suffering upon others, nevertheless retain their fundamental humanity and carry within themselves the capacity to change. Long and deserved though their sentences may be, they retain the right to hope that, someday, they may have atoned for the wrongs which they have committed. They ought not to be deprived entirely of such hope. To deny them the experience of hope would be to deny a fundamental aspect of their humanity and, to do that, would be degrading’
Judge Anne Power Ford, Vinter and Others v’s The United Kingdom, July 2013

10. We all need to apologize, and we all need to forgive or this human project will surely self destruct. No wonder that almost two thirds of Jesus’ teaching is directly or indirectly about forgiveness. Otherwise, history devolves into taking sides, bitterness, holding grudges, and the violence that inevitably follows. As others have said, “forgiveness is to let go of our hope for a different past.” Reality is what it is, and such acceptance leads to great freedom, as long as there is also both accountability and healing forgiveness
Fr Richard Rohr, 12 June 2018

11. A Voice for Victims
He said: “Everybody was saying to me, ‘Lloyd, you gotta be for the death penalty or it’ll look like you didn’t love your boy’. I pictured putting both of those men in an electric chair and pulling the switch real slowly so they would feel pain like we were feeling pain.” But Lloyd told me he didn’t like what was happening to him. He was angry all the time, and he was losing every bit of kindness that had been in him. So he set his face to go down the road of forgiveness. He’s the real hero of the book Dead Man Walking.

12. A Voice for Victims

13. When Crucified between two criminals, Jesus ended as he had lived – in solidarity with society’s victims rather than with society’s successes
O’Collins, Gerald, Interpreting Jesus, Mowbray, London, 2000, p.95