Mercy for Rene Lima- Marin
Without justice there can be no mercy. When the laws are not upheld, forbearance is negligence, forgiveness mere apathy. Justice is the dispensing of punishment for a crime. Justice upholds rule of law and acknowledges the dignity of the victim and the gravity of his or her losses. Justice affirms the natural right of every human being to his own life, liberty and property. Those who trample upon these rights, through due process, lose their own. Without justice, the law is impotent and government has failed its most basic purpose to protect the unalienable rights of its citizens.
Mercy, on the other hand, is the intentional withholding of punishment. It is not deserved but is sometimes warranted. In her famous plea for leniency, Shakespeare’s Portia in “The Merchant of Venice,” says of mercy:
Mercy is granted because mercy is needed by us all. Mercy acknowledges universal human fallibility and provides the guilty a chance to make right. Like justice, it seeks the greater good.
The Trump administration has diligently upheld immigration laws. It has sought justice, but now it should grant mercy by letting Rene Lima- Marin go home to his family.
Lima- Marin fled Cuba as a child in the 1980 Mariel boatlift. He was a U. S. legal resident until convicted of armed robbery at the age of 19. Although sentenced to 98 years in prison, LimaMarin was released after eight years on a paperwork error. Because his legal residency had been revoked, Immigration and Customs Enforcement ( ICE) detained Lima- Marin for deportation but released him after six months because Cuba was not accepting deportees who came to the U. S. in the Mariel boatlift.
Once a free man, Lima- Marin embraced his second chance to live a virtuous life. He got a job, got married, and became a fafrom ther. In 2014, the state discovered the error and had LimaMarin returned to prison. Earlier this year, a judge ordered him released and Gov. John Hickenlooper, with bipartisan support from the legislature, pardoned him. No sooner was he released than ICE took him into custody. An immigration court dismissed Lima- Marin’s case late last week, but then the U. S. Department of Homeland Security appealed the case. Lima- Marin remains in an Aurora detention facility.
Is returning a man to the despotic country he fled as a young child, leaving a wife and sons without a father, and destroying the good life he built on a second chance justice for armed robbery? Perhaps, but will justice serve the greater good or would mercy?
Abraham Lincoln once said, “I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.”
In the case of Lima- Marin the fruit of justice would be bitter for him, his family, and his community. By rending the fabric of those lives, strict justice would add injury to the injury of the original crime for which it is meant to atone.
The fruits of mercy, by contrast, will be reunion, restoration and continued reconciliation between a former offender and society. As Shakespeare observed, mercy benefits the giver aswell as the receiver. Mercy for Lima
Marin is good for us all.