Posted: August 13th, 2022

Forgiveness in Christ and being accountable to the state essay

Essay
There is a significant difference between forgiveness in Christ and being accountable to the state. Any person who respects the New Testament teaching happily admits that God’s grace and salvation by means of that grace is available to any individual, no matter how evil they have been (Smith, 2017). If the individual confesses his/her sins and commits to Christ as his/her Savior, they are forgiven, and everything they did in the past is forgotten; as such, the person is considered a new creature. This is what has happened to the death row inmate in this case. God has forgiven his sins since he has seen the error of his ways. In the kingdom of God, he is seen as a new person. However, it should be noted that the inmate is still accountable to the State. The State has put various laws in place to guide human behavior and to maintain order in society (Fisher, 2013). The laws have also clearly stated the punishments that one will face if they break these laws. The inmate must have committed a heinous crime for him to be put on death row; to this end, the state normally looks out for the interest of justice not whether a person has repented or not (Fisher, 2013). Therefore, justice has to be delivered to the victim and his family. This way, people are discouraged from committing crime since they are made aware that asking for forgiveness will not help them to escape facing the consequences of their actions.
Capital punishment is the appropriate sentence for this inmate, and as such, justice is being served. Justice demands that those individuals found guilty of committing gruesome offenses of homicide be given a death sentence. Justice is basically a matter of making sure that each individual in society is treated in an equal manner (Hodgkinson, 2014). It is considered unfair when an offender willingly imposes bigger losses on other people than he/she has to bear. If the offenders receive losses from society that are less than the losses that they imposed on their innocent victims, society would be perceived to be supporting criminals permitting them to get away with incurring lesser costs than their victims had to incur (Hodgkinson, 2014). Therefore, for justice to be served, society must inflict on offenders losses equal to those they inflicted on innocent individuals. Therefore, by inflicting death on the inmate since he killed another in this case, the capital punishment guarantees justice for all-the victim, the family, and the society at large.
Retributive justice is a form of punishment that seeks to ensure that an offender suffers for breaking the law; it also requires that the response to a crime to be proportional to the offence (Strang & Braithwaite, 2017). On the contrary, restorative justice puts focus on rehabilitating the offenders via reconciliation with victims and the community at large (Strang & Braithwaite, 2017). Therefore, this scenario is an example of retributive justice because the inmate will be made to pay for his crime through death. Since the inmate killed another person, he is also going to be executed; as such, this punishment is proportional to his crime. In addition, this scenario cannot be perceived as restorative justice as the inmate is not given any opportunity to reconcile with the victim and/or his family and the community as a whole.

References
Fisher, K. (2013). Moral accountability and international criminal law: Holding agents of atrocity accountable to the world. Routledge.
Hodgkinson, M. P. (2014). Capital punishment: New perspectives. Ashgate Publishing.
Smith, E. (2017). The scandal of god’s forgiveness. Wipf and Stock Publishers.
Strang, H., & Braithwaite, J. (2017). Restorative justice: Philosophy to practice. Routledge.

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