North - Victim's Rights - The Biblical View of Civil Justice (1990).pdf

[ Find more at www.torrentportal.com ] This is Gary North's monumental book Victim's Rights - The Biblical View of Civil Justice (1990) which is a detailed study of biblical Exodus 21 and 22: the case laws. It identifies the fundamental principle of biblical civil justice: the obligation of the civil government to defend the interest of the victims of crime, and the obligation of the criminal, not the State, to pay restitution. The criminal does not owe a "debt to society." He owes a debt to his victim. Something is wrong - radically wrong - with the criminal justice system in the United States. Crime has been on the rise since the mid-1960's. The courts are clogged. The jails are overflowing, yet convicted criminals return to lives of crime upon release. The public is increasingly contemptuous of the criminal justice system. What is the problem? The problem is this: there is today no agreed-upon public standard of justice. The courts are too liberal to suit the public, yet voters do not seem to know what the right sentence ought to be in any given case. The public is politically paralyzed because no one agrees on what constitutes justice. The entire criminal justice system reflects this paralysis. Sentences swing from the appallingly stiff to little more than a wrist slap. Because modern Christians have neglected or rejected the case laws of Exodus, they are now in judicial bondage to humanists, who see criminals as the victims and the law-abiding public as the aggressor. "Society" is said to be at fault. This the philosophy of environmental determinism. Result: injustice on a wide scale. What is needed is exactly what Colson recommends: a return to the case laws of the Bible. Victim's Rights shows what judicial changes this would require and how such a system could work today. North sets out the biblical view of crime and punishment, arguing that in all cases biblical law works to restore the victims while punishing the criminal - the reverse of the modern judicial practice, which leaves the victim in his suffering and seeks to rehabilitate the criminal. He takes up case by case the teachings on crime and punishment handed down by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, discusses what these meant in that society, and suggests implications for today. 325 pages. A must read for everyone.