Damned Mercy?

Maurice Clemmons should not have received mercy. In fact, Mike Huckabee is damnably culpable for extending mercy to such a monster. If Governor Huckabee had not gone along with the recommendation of the clemency board, Maurice Clemmons would not have been out on the street. He would not have shot dead four police officers in the south end of my parish this past Sunday. For this act of damned mercy, Huckabee is disqualified from any further participation in national politics. At least this is what I’ve heard this week on talk radio.

Of course, by the same standard, God is disqualified from participation in national politics. God is responsible for the holocaust, the Boston Strangler, Timothy McVeigh and 9/11. God’s damned mercy allows undeserving sinners to go right on doing evil. And Jesus agrees with this divine policy of failing to incarcerate or incinerate sinners. He even agrees with God actually enabling them. Jesus said approvingly, “God sends his rain on the just and the unjust.” (Matthew 5).

I don’t know if Governor Huckabee would make a good president of the United States, but the fact that one of his “acts of mercy” was twisted by its recipient into an occasion for committing a horrific atrocity is no mark against the governor. It is easy in hindsight to argue that Clemmons should have been jailed for life at age sixteen. However, the people making the decision to reduce his sentence and ultimately parole Clemmons were doing their best to practice mercy toward a criminal without violating their role as guardians of social justice. Eliminating mercy from our treatment of criminals makes no more sense than eliminating mercy from any other sector of our social interaction.

Eliminate all mercy for criminals and you might as well go ahead and eliminate hope, affection, marriage vows, and childrearing–all of which look to an uncertain future and the absolute certainty that at least some percentage will prove misguided in hindsight. Mercy may open the door for damnable crimes. That does not make mercy itself damnable.