Second Chances

Does every human being have the right to redemption? Is a sentence of life without possibility of parole, imposed for a crime committed at whatever age, however horrific, inherently unjust?

What about the man who slaughtered my neighbor, and nine other folks he didn’t know, because he’d felt slighted the night before by some other person he didn’t know, at the grocery store down the street? What about the twenty-four-year-old stable boy who fired three shots into the head and back of Robert F. Kennedy? What about the quivering wreck who ordered the extermination of every Jew he could get other people’s hands on?

The authors of the article attached here below, soon to appear in Northwestern University Law Review, say yes, redemption is a human right, and yes, it belongs to every one of those people.

I’ll let them tell you why.