Jesus on Death Row: The Trial of Jesus and American Capital Punishment by Mark Osler

Author:Mark Osler [Osler, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: The Trail Of Jesus And American Capital Punishment
Publisher: Abingdon Press
Published: 2009-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

When Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the servant-girls of the high priest came by. When she saw Peter warming himself, she stared at him and said, "You also were with Jesus, the man from Nazareth." But he denied it, saying, "I do not know or understand what you are talking about."

Could it be that the high priest's servant approached Peter as a potential witness at the trial? We do not know that this was definitely the case, but it fits with the context of the scene. This possibility certainly casts Peter in a better light; it could be that he was protecting Jesus by avoiding a situation where he would be forced to testify to what he truly believed—that Jesus was the Son of God.8

Is Peter's ability to avoid testifying a reflection of our modern process? Is taking the easy way out and relying on witnesses who are there to earn a reward of some type good enough? To answer these questions, we must answer tough questions about costs and efficiency.

Our modern reliance on cooperators is borne of the same impulse that led Caiaphas to recruit unreliable witnesses: We don't want to spend the time and money necessary to get better evidence, and we worry that requiring more neutral evidence may lead to the acquittals of those we would like to convict, imprison, and sometimes execute.

Is the use of cooperators out of hand? To this question, I offer a single statistic. In 1998, more than 63 percent of the narcoticstrafficking defendants tried in the federal Eastern District of Pennsylvania received a break at sentencing for cooperating with the government.9 Think about that—more than half of the defendants in that type of case were cooperating.10 Who, then, were they informing on? Apparently, they mostly ended up pointing to the 37 percent of defendants who did not get such a break. A system so reliant on cooperators motivated by personal interest is not efficient; it is broken.

Perhaps, as in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, we need fewer paid-off cooperators and more diligent servant girls in the courtyards looking for those who can and will tell the truth.

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