Domestic Homicide in South Carolina
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread," wrote French intellectual and social critic Anatole France in The Red Lily in 1894 and in doing so he summarized the often great distance that exists between laws and people's concepts of justice and truth. Justice is a slippery concept and the truth even more so - and this is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the practices of the "truth commissions" established in a number of countries newly accustoming themselves to democracy. The Orwellian sound of "truth commission" is not inappropriate, for the connection between the actions of these commissions - in places like Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala and South Africa - and the truth of experience or any sense of absolute justice was both tenuous and complex. This paper explores that relationship between these commissions and larger questions of truth and justice, of memory and forgetting.
We should begin by noting something that is so obvious that it often goes unnoted: Laws reflect not universal, natural conditions but particular cultural and social constructions. Laws reflect the consensus of a society at a given moment in time, or rather they reflect the consensus of the leaders of a society at a given moment in time. That leadership can be very narrowly defined - as in an absolute monarchy, in which the only vote that counts is that of the king or queen - or relatively broadly define - as in a direct democracy, where the opinion and vote of each citizen is worth the same as the opinion and vote of every other citizen.
And yes, even as we recognize the ways in which laws are limited, they are an important part of our understanding of ourselves as a people, they form a part of our sense of both self and collective identity. One of the things that defines each one of us in a given society (at least according to democratic traditions) is that we are each governed by the same laws. When this compact is broken, it breaks open the sense of identity that each one of us has. Both identity and memory become fragmented as Osriel (1995) argues. When the structures of the state warp around us, we no longer understand who it is that we are.
In her introduction Minow (1998) argues that there are only a few key reasons for such collective actions in pursuit of the truth:
Perhaps there simply are two purposes animating societal responses to collective violence: justice and truth. Justice may call for truth but also demands accountability. And the institutions for securing accountability - notably trial courts - may impede or ignore truth. Democratic guarantees protecting the rights of defendants place those rights at least in part ahead of truth-seeking; undemocratic trials may proceed to judgment and punishment with disregard for particular truths or their complex limitations beyond particular defendants. Then the question becomes: Should justice or truth take precedence? Of what value are facts without justice? If accountability is the aim, does it require legal proceedings and punishment? Do legal proceedings generate knowledge?
Truth commissions might be seen as a way in which to right this disintegration of memory and identity, but this is too often not the case. Truth Commissions suggest that there are remedies for the past - that it is possible to find justice for past wrongs and then to move on. But this does not square with the memories of those who were tortured or those whose loved ones simply disappeared. Truth Commissions suggest that there can be a bridge made between the before and after that exists in people who have been traumatized, but in reality this is often not the case, as Minow (1998) suggests. For most people who have witnessed terrible things there will always be a before and an after, and for them truth commissions tend to stand in a type of no-man's land between these too, as much a barrier as a bridge.
Truth can sometimes not be salvaged from vengeance, Minoe (1998, p. 13) argues, nor perhaps should it be:
Although [vengeance] may sound pejorative, it embodies important ingredients of moral response to wrongdoing. We should pursue punishment because wrongdoers should get what is coming them; this is one defense - or perhaps restatement - of vengeance....
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now