c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com)

UNDATED _ As one who devoured”Runaway Jury”in a single weekend, I understand why the courtroom dramas of John Grisham sell bigtime.

Not only are writers like Grisham and Scott Turow good storytellers, but court cases have become our society’s morality plays and our dreamworld of what we wish reality was like: decisive, controllable, and subject to rules.

Take, for example, the case of Thomas Richard Jones, a 39-year-old alcoholic convicted in Winston-Salem, N.C., of first-degree murder for driving while impaired and causing an accident that killed two college girls. He was sentenced, as Merle Haggard once sang, to”life without parole.” In the same week, Army Staff Sgt. Delmar Simpson got 25 years in prison for raping six women under his command. And R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. dodged the bullet in a Florida courtroom after jurors in a liability case felt hamstrung by a judge’s instructions and gave Reynolds the verdict in a closely watched case.

But what really happened in these cases?

The prosecutor sought the death penalty for Jones, then accepted a life sentence as a”national precedent.”Precedent for what? Have the streets become safer? Is there a single alcoholic who will not drive home because, in mid-tear, he remembers the Jones case?

Observers of the Delmar Simpson trial argued over the 25-year sentence _ too much? too little? _ as if the perfect sentence would have accomplished something. And tobacco-trial watchers probed one panel’s decision for shifting winds in anti-tobacco litigation.

Without diminishing the defendants’ accountability for crimes committed, I have to wonder what illusions were perpetuated by these cases.

Foremost, it seems to me, is the illusion that punishment works. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, many still believe the answer to human waywardness is harsher punishment. Fry the murderers, castrate sex offenders, lock up drug dealers, and sue anyone who crosses you. Having reinvented death chambers and built more jail cells, do we, in fact, feel any safer? About all that seems served by harsher punishment is our need for revenge, if we have such a right.

The second illusion is that justice is served when court verdicts are rendered. Having just served on a jury, I know that twelve people being able to agree on something has little to do with justice and more to do with the very psychodynamics that make Grisham’s novels so compelling.

The other Simpson trial, O.J.’s, seems to have turned not on evidence or law, but on the jury’s fury at being cooped up. The tobacco trial turned not on RJR’s culpability, but on the judge’s instructions to the jury.

We certainly would suffer if we didn’t have jury trials and reasonable laws. But having said that, we need to recognize that justice isn’t about court cases, it’s about equitable distribution of economic benefits, fair treatment of all, freedom from prejudice, and protection from the powerful. Court cases might well be part of such pursuits, but it’s an illusion to think that court cases win the battle against injustice.

The third illusion has to do with rules. Many believe that better rules make better people; or put another way, rules shape behavior. The Roman Catholic Church tried for centuries to improve marriages by banning divorce. Like its admonitions on birth control, the church’s divorce rules seem to have accomplished little except promote guilt.

In similar chasing of fancy, mainline churches are trying to deal with the complexities of human sexuality by revising their rules on ordination and membership. Not that ordination rules don’t matter, but they have little impact on behavior. It’s like the current movement toward using statutory rape laws to discourage sex among teens. Maybe a few parents feel vindicated, but teen-age sexuality is actually being shaped by fear of disease and by growing assertiveness among young women.

Courtroom dramas are wonderful spectator events. Watching jurors watch witnesses is as good as baseball any day. But justice and human behavior are matters of the heart and the will, not the law. Sending one drunk to jail for life doesn’t make me one bit more eager to drive city streets on Saturday night.

MJP END EHRICH