When they lay the mother and her four children to rest, perhaps they’ll play John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” or “All You Need is Love.”
Never mind that Lennon himself was gunned down. For people who seek simple solutions to tough problems, nothing beats forgiveness.
“We want Jordan to know that he’s been forgiven,” said Jesse Adams, the brother of the Medford, Ore., mother who was killed along with her four children.
Police said Jordan Adam Criado, 51, stabbed his wife Tabasha Paige-Criado, their three sons and a daughter and then set the house on fire. Jordan Criado remains hospitalized for smoke inhalation.
Adams quoted from the Bible at a press conference and said God had forgiven him when he didn’t deserve it.
“So I’m going to forgive,” Adams said.
News stories didn’t indicate why God had supposedly forgiven him; it sounded like Adams himself has a criminal record. If so, it would be more relevant to know if his victims – who would be real – forgave him, rather than hear about some grace he allegedly received from a male deity who may or may not exist.
Jordan Criado does have a criminal record. In 1990, he was sentenced to 20 years in a California prison for eight counts of lewd conduct with a child under 14.
Considering that the children he had with Paige-Criado were 7, 6, 5 and 2 he didn’t spend anywhere near 20 years in prison. (As a sex offender, he would not have been allowed conjugal visits.)
Second chances are a form of forgiveness, and Criado got one when he was released from prison. He received more forgiveness when Paige-Criado overlooked his criminal history and married him.
While her brother was in Medford handling her funeral preparations and preaching forgiveness, in Texas a shooting victim was urging forgiveness for a man scheduled to be executed.
Rais Bhuiyan was unsuccessful in stopping the execution, but his public pleas won him sympathetic media attention and helped turn Mark Stroman’s “death chamber” into a stage where the murderer got to take a dramatic final bow, complete with last words.
Some of the facts about Stroman’s crimes went missing in news stories. In one story in the New York Times, Stroman, 41, was introduced as “a stonecutter from Dallas” who shot convenience store clerks he believed were Arabs in the weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Bhuiyan, from Bangladesh, lost his sight in one eye after Stroman shot him in the face.
In many stories, the victims Stroman killed were only mentioned in passing: Vasudev Patel, an Indian immigrant who was Hindu, and Waqar Hasan, a Muslim born in Pakistan. Left out in detail was Stroman’s extensive criminal history of burglary, armed robbery and credit card fraud – and his membership in the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist prison gang.
Those hard facts didn’t jibe with the conciliatory mood in stories focusing on forgiveness. Instead, the emphasis in coverage was on Bhuiyan who, after suffering much pain and disfigurement, had made an extraordinary gesture to redeem a man of hate.
“I’m eagerly awaiting to see him in person and exchange ideas. I would talk about love and compassion,” Bhuiyan said. “We all make mistakes. He’s another human being, like me. Hate the sin, not the sinner. It’s very important that I meet him to tell him I feel for him and I strongly believe he should get a second chance. … He could educate a lot of people.”
Bhuiyan maintains a Web site, Hatenomore.org, that declares the families of the two dead men also forgave Stroman and didn’t want him to be executed.
But according to the Dallas Morning News, a relative of Patel’s said the day of the jury verdict that the family was “very happy with the verdict” and that the killings called for the death penalty.
Bhuiyan shows the same self-righteousness as Helen Prejean, who never met a dead victim she couldn’t walk on. (She doesn’t have to worry about them talking back.)
Forgiveness is promoted like a brand, and its empty motto is “Hate the sin, not the sinner.”
If it weren’t for the sinner, we wouldn’t have the sin.
That’s something even a placid, low-crime country like Norway can now appreciate.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
When I first heard about the Medford family on TV, I turned to my wife and said something like, “The next thing they’ll show is a memorial outside the burned house with flowers and toys.” My wife thought I was being cynical. That’s in fact what happened. They probably had a candlelight ceremony too.
I feel bad about the kids. The neighbors too. They look like salt of the earth kind of people. I don’t like how these stories end up sounding alike. Some reporter always asks about closure.
It will be interesting to see if a forgiveness consensus can be reached for the fellow in Norway.
The maximum allowable sentence, or so I read, is 10 or 20 years. If this is so I’d open up a ministry of forgiveness there.
Someone should have stopped him within 10 minutes.
Looks like your ministry of forgiveness will have a market in Norway. At Gary Haugen’s next court hearing, he will probably cite Breivik’s potential, maximum sentence of 21 years as further proof that there is no justice on Death Row.
Clever idea putting Brevik in four weeks of solitary. There’s no doubt he killed these people; he admits it. If he were in Portland and given an automatic stay in solitary, the ACLU and Steven Wax would probably be up in arms.
Pamela
Forgiveness and murder
compiled and written by Dudley Sharp
“The Sin of Forgiveness”
http://metaphysicalperegrine.blogspot.com/2009/02/sin-of-forgiveness.html
“TOLERANCE, UNDERSTANDING, AND FORGIVENESS”
GARY W. SUMMERS
http://www.spiritualperspectives.org/articles/documents/forgive.html
“The More Given, The Less Earned”
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/04/21/the_more_given_the_less_earned_96085.html
Who gives forgiveness for murder?
published July 10, 2007 – Victoria Advocate
BY DUDLEY SHARP
Cornelus Garza told the murderer of his wife, Janie Elizabeth, “I don’t forgive you”(“You should be locked up forever,” July 07, 2007, Victoria Advocate).
Even if he wanted to forgive the murderer, does he have that right?
It is not up to Mr. Garza to forgive the murderer. It is up to the principal party harmed – Janie Elizabeth. No one disputes that all of those who loved and knew Janie Elizabeth were terribly wronged and hurt, severely, by her murder.
If my uncle was robbed, what does it mean for me to forgive the robber? If anything, it is an insult to the harm my uncle has suffered.
The act of forgiveness is quite unique.
If we go by biblical instruction, it includes that the wrongdoer confess his wrong, find honest sorrow and remorse and state that he will do all he can to not harm again – to change his ways, prior to any forgiveness being given, by the specific party harmed.
To forgive those who have not repented is to give approval of what they have done, while rejecting the importance of responsibility and atonement. It would not be mercy, but insult.
Murder is unique, both biblically and humanistically.
Biblically, the crime of murder is viewed as, exactly, a crime against God, because man is made in the image of God. It is an eternal crime. Murderers can take responsibility for their crimes, they can work to change, but there can be no atonement for murder.
Humanistically, meaning, with no expectation of a godhead or afterlife, it is only this earthly life that we have, so murder curtails an even greater portion of our lives.
Can murderers be forgiven by God? Biblically, the answer is clearly yes. Can murderers receive true forgiveness on earth? The answer is clearly no.
Dudley Sharp
e-mail sharpjfa@aol.com, 713-622-5491,
Houston, Texas
Mr. Sharp has appeared on ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, FOX, NBC, NPR, PBS , VOA and many other TV and radio networks, on such programs as Nightline, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The O’Reilly Factor, etc., has been quoted in newspapers throughout the world and is a published author.
A former opponent of capital punishment, he has written and granted interviews about, testified on and debated the subject of the death penalty, extensively and internationally.