What if Jesus had been tried under Texas law? Would he still be executed?

[The Straight Story]

What if Jesus had been tried under Texas law?


What if Jesus were sentenced under Texas laws? Would he still be executed? That question led Baylor Law School professor Mark Osler to stage the trial of Christ under the rules of Texas law for a Waco congregation. The death penalty opponent and sentencing guidelines expert summarized his thoughts in a book published last year, Jesus on Death Row.

The following is an interview I conducted with Mark Osler. An abbreviated version will appear in Sunday's Points Section.

Landauer: You staged the trial of Christ under the laws of Texas at a Baptist Church in Waco as an untenured professor. What surprised you most about how that experience played out?

Osler: Among many surprises, one of the most striking was the willingness of people in the congregation to consider this very old question in a new light. Many, if not most, had not thought about the modern death penalty in the context of Christ's execution, but once that idea was presented, even those who had participated in capital murder juries (there were two in that congregation) eagerly engaged in the exercise. This is consistent with what I have seen generally in talking about the book -- people of faith who may disagree with me have been uniformly warm and receptive to genuine and heartfelt discussion, largely because it is a debate in which we begin with a common set of beliefs about the source of all knowledge.

Landauer: Given that there is generally a lack of discussion on this issue in Texas, then, do you see people of faith as possibly playing a major role? Should this discussion be taking place in more faith communities?

Osler: Given the prominence of this issue in Texas, it of course should be part of what faith communities talk about, given that our faith instructs us as individuals when we engage with the world. This is an issue, too, where there is more than one principled position, and there are people of faith I greatly respect on the other side of this debate. When we talk about our society choosing to kill our own citizens, we are talking about a moral issue, and people of faith so often lead the way in those discussions. In fact, people of faith have already done so, especially within the Catholic church; I am struck by how important this issue is to many Catholics, and humbled by the sincerity with which they wrestle with these questions.

http://deathpenaltyblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2010/03/what-if-jesus-had-been-tried-u.html

[SpiralHawk]

1. With a republicon judge, he'd be tortured

fer sure because of his socialist ideas about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked...

[conspirator]

25. I'd be executed twice. To make sure he didn't ressurect nt

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. Naw, he was charged with advocating the overthrow of the government.

He'd have been turned over to the Feds, and waterboarded.

[Bucky]

32. Wait, that's what Rick Perry advocated and all that happened was he got renominated

Of course Rick Perry has better hair than Jesus

[Statistical]

3. What capital crime under TX statute did Jesus commit?

[pitohui]

4. none, he arguably committed a federal offense but no state offense

he might have been arrested "in" texas but it wouldn't have been by the state of texas, if you agree that he argued for the violent overthrow of the country and the installation of himself as king or "lord," then this would be a federal offense

i doubt it would get the death penalty, hell, guys got the death penalty for pick pocketing in those days

it would prob. get some club fed w. bernie madoff

[aquart]

8. Hard to build a religious movement on that kind of sentence.

Might have been best for everyone.

[nyc 4 Biden]

17. madoff is in maximum security prison.

if you are sentenced to a long enough term , you are not permitted to serve it in a minimum security complex regardless of the charges.

eta: he is in medium security complex, but not a camp by any means. i don't feel bad for him at all, just pointing it out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Correctional_Complex,_Butner

[The Straight Story]

6. I think this from the article explains it fairly well:

Landauer: In your book, you say that the "troubling account of Jesus as a criminal defendant should be part of the discussion" about the death penalty. But, why? Ancient law and a death sentence carried out within hours doesn't really equate to our deliberative and slow process for executing heinous murderers, does it?

Osler: Part of my own spiritual journey with writing this book was finding that, in many ways, Christ's experience does equate with our own process and its problems. For example, one constant in the Gospel accounts is the mob of people calling for death who seem to follow Jesus at each step. This mob influences the political actors, Pontius Pilate and Herod, as they decline to stop the execution, wrong as it is. Too often, the flaws in our own process (especially in Texas) are the result of having it all driven by an elected district attorney, an elected district court judge, an elected Court of Criminal Appeals, and an elected governor (considering clemency), all of whom know sparing the life of a capital defendant is likely to turn the anger of the population against them, regardless of the real problems in a case.

IOW - if Jesus were on trial in Texas for the same crimes back then, and there was a death penalty for the same crimes, would he get it?

[WolverineDG]

11. You need murder + one aggravated felony

to even indict someone for the death penalty in Texas, so no, he wouldn't.

dg

[Name removed]

5. Deleted message

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[hunter]

7. The replies of the death penalty supporters there are astonishing.

They never once realize that they themselves would fail to recognize Jesus and demand His crucification.

Those who are most convinced they know Jesus are often the ones who know Him the least.

[Statistical]

14. Who here support death penalties for the "crimes" Jesus committed?

Wouldn't one of the checks & balances on Death Penalty be the very fact that it can only be used in a very limited number of cases to begin with.

[hunter]

18. But it wouldn't happen that way. We're Rome.

Jesus would be stirring up trouble in rural Columbia or somewhere and a U.S. trained and funded death squad would take him out.

Texas just kills the riffraff, a few innocent of the crimes they were charged with.

[Name removed]

9. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Birthmark]

10. Deleted because I ironically posted twice. nt

[RagAss]

12. Fried with eggs !

[SolidGold]

13. Don't put him on trial, but burn him as a witch?

I dunno about you guys but if someone was walking around doing shit from the bible I'd think it's a witch!


BURN Z WITCH!

</sarcasm>

[Dappleganger]

15. Interesting article which made me think.

Thanks for sharing this, I posted it on my FB account in hopes that some of my RW relatives and friends will read it.

[DavidDvorkin]

16. Unanswerable, given that Texas didn't exist back then, and neither did Jesus.

[hunter]

19. Nothing in the past exists, and that which existed was not as we know it.

I'll concede that some reconstructions of the past are more accurate than others.

Nevertheless, the New Testament is a historical document and it tends to be as strongly biased and fanciful as other documents of its time.

Most history is not the product of a process like today's where written documentation is created simultaneously with events. Histories tended to get written down long after the original events occurred.

That doesn't mean our own history isn't as biased. You can find many inaccurate and misleading historical interpretations and flat out fabrications in our own well "documented" modern history. My favorite examples among these these are in regard to the development of the atomic bomb. One very common and false historical interpretation is that Truman spared the U.S. and Japan a terrible ground invasion of Japan when he approved the use of atomic weapons, and thus "saved" countless lives.

But Truman's actual plan, had not Japan surrendered, was to simply pulverize them with many more conventional and nuclear weapons until they did surrender, or until there was nothing left of Japanese civilization to surrender. By Victory-Europe plans for invading the Japanese mainland were not similar to the war's previous bloodbaths because the Japanese military machine was already collapsing. And whatever plans there were for invasion went entirely out the window with the successful Trinity test in New Mexico.

In contradiction to the history most U.S. Americans might tell, the U.S. did not create three fabulously expensive atomic bombs hand made by scientists, drop two on Japan, and then quit until later when the Soviet Union surprised us by building their own bomb using stolen U.S. secrets.

In fact the production facilities making plutonium for "Fat Man" kinds of bombs had a huge capacity and kept right on running through the 1960s. By the end of 1949 we'd built hundreds of "Fat Man" style bombs and we kept building them at that rate until May of 1951 when a new and improved "high efficiency" fission bomb started to roll down the assembly lines.

As the first and only nation to use atomic weapons in war it was perfectly clear to all potential enemies of the United States that we'd do it again. Only Americans tend to believe that Truman's decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan was a necessary tragedy that "saved" countless lives. The Soviet Union clearly perceived this threat and started building their own bombs. They had the scientists, they had the engineers, they had the resources. So they built atomic bombs.

My point is that in our culture we've got our own historical myths and some are as fanciful as things you read in the New Testament.

Going back to the original topic, it's perfectly reasonable to accept Jesus as a historical figure even when you dismiss the supernatural stuff.

[DavidDvorkin]

20. There is no real evidence for an historical Jesus

The New Testament is a hodge podge of mythologies, badly rewritten. It's meaningless to base the question in the OP on those stories.

[hunter]

22. Everything is a story. Everything is a fiction.

Human beings are story tellers, that's how we define ourselves, that's how our minds work.

Even our science is fiction, unique only because we seek to test it by careful observation and by experiment.

I've no evidence that DavidDvorkin exists, or that he might be whatever he claims to be.

In my world, so far, DavidDvorkin is a fiction, a story; as distant from my own personal reality, my own living story, as any other fiction.

[DavidDvorkin]

28. I thought such ideas were intriguing when I was a kid

Later, I saw that how pointless and silly such thinking is.

[hunter]

29. I reached a point where I thought everything was pointless.

Top that!

:hi:

[DavidDvorkin]

30. Oh, why bother?

:)

[Bucky]

33. Ha! Well played!

I reached a point where everything I thought was pointless.

[IndianaGreen]

21. He would have been shot by the FBI as he slept, like Fred Hampton

Pesky revolutionaries always seem to die under questionable circumstances.

[hunter]

26. John & Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King...

... even feckless Ronald Reagan, who I despise.

Lots of "questionable circumstances."

[tom_paine]

34. Don't cross the Dulles-Bush faction (now the Bush-Cheney) faction of the Empire

That lil' liberal hippie socialist fascist Jesus wouldn't have stood a chance.

He would have been Kennedied or Wellstoned or eprahps been declared an enemy combatant and throw in the dungeon until the RW Lie Machine had discredited him sufficiently and sensory-deprivation had left him a shattered husk of a man.

Plus, he was SWARTHY (not blonde-haired & blue-eyed, but you can't expect White Folks to worship a "person of color").

[B Calm]

23. Hell it's Texas, they just gave a man 35 yrs for having 2 ounces of pot!

Activist Judges love Texas!

[TexasObserver]

27. Four, but who's counting?

They used a statute that makes dealing within 1000 feet of a school a much more serious level of crime. They construed dealing from the presence of other baggies, apparently. And the school was a day care center. I understand it was 4.6 ounces, but that allegedly included over one ounce of baggie.

This was in Tyler, pretty much the Old Confederacy center of Texas. I don't know if the defendant was black, but I suspect he was.

I read all this online in some newspaper, and can't vouch for any of it. I hope there is reversible error. Every day, some dangerous criminal gets out to make room for one that isn't dangerous. You'd think we'd learn, but we don't.

[TexasObserver]

24. Even in modern day Texas, no death penalty for what Jesus did.

They would definitely imprison him for trashing the temple. They might put him away for inciting a riot. Worst case scenario in modern day Texas would be a few years in prison.

If he was carrying, however, he could get 35 years.

Now, he might have been killed in prison, or had an accident before trial, or supposedly hung himself in a jail cell.

[Rabrrrrrr]

31. Not under the law, no. He would have been executed earlier by a Christian for talking peace and love

He never would last long enough to get arrested or stand trial. Some Johnny Be Faithful Super Jeebuz Believin' Good Ol' Boy would have put a .44 through his head years ago for speaking about God's love, peace, caring for your neighbors, and so on.