The Past on Trial: Birmingham, the Bombing, and Restorative Justice.

Source: (2008) California Law Review. 96(2): 471-504.

The community, media, and scholarly responses to these trials point to the way that a crime’s effects can reach far beyond the individual perpetrator and victim. In the context of unresolved civil rights-era violence, one murder or bombing inevitably expands outward and into the larger story of segregation and massive resistance; into the systemic, racially-based injustices of southern law enforcement; and to the New South’s willingness to move quickly forward without reconciling its troubled past. Restorative justice theory, a reform movement within the criminal justice system, can help contextualize the broad consequences of these crimes. Taking the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing as an example, I use restorative justice theory to expand the concept of harm resulting from this one incident. Rather than understanding the crime in traditional terms as an abstract harm against the state, we must imagine it as an act with consequences for the victims, the community at large, the offenders themselves, and the relationships among all three. By viewing this larger harm through the lens of restorative justice theory, we can expand our concept of ‘victim,’ and explore the need to think creatively about extrajudicial remedies that may to restore the damage wrought by crime. (excerpt)