Book Review: Reforming Criminal Justice, by Matthew T. Martens
Matthew T. Martens, Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal. Crossway, 2023. 416 pages.
Few would say that the criminal justice system is working smoothly in America. But views about exactly where it gets off track will vary depending on personal background, experience, and political affiliations.
Is there too little enforcement? Too much? Is criminal justice too harsh? Too lenient? Do people charged with crimes have too many legal protections, getting in the way of achieving actual justice? Or do they have too few legal protections, leading to unjust results?
These are tough, controversial questions for experts in law and public policy, but they also affect every citizen.
Matthew Martens’s new book, Reforming Criminal Justice, is a valuable resource to help Christians wrestle with these issues. Martens is a practicing attorney who has worked in the criminal justice system as both a prosecutor and defense attorney. He is also well read in Christian theology and ethics. He brings these areas of expertise together in this theologically rich reflection on criminal justice.
Criminal Justice as a Litmus Test for Government
The book tackles the subject in two parts. In the first half of the book, Martens presents a Christian ethical framework for evaluating criminal justice. In the second half, he explains key components of America’s criminal justice system and offers a thought-provoking evaluation of how each of these steps serves (or fails to serve) the biblical standards for criminal justice.
When the Apostle Paul described the God-given role of civil government (Rom. 13:1–4), he put criminal justice front and center. God grants civil government the authority to restrain evil conduct. The civil magistrate “is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (Rom. 13:4).
Criminal law is an inherently moral enterprise. To execute justice against wrongdoing, the civil government is authorized to exercise just force against the wrongdoer. That’s the sword Paul references. But if the civil government exercises force against someone who did nothing wrong, then it’s the government in the wrong.
Martens draws a logical inference from Paul’s divinely inspired account of the proper role for civil government. In any culture, criminal justice is an important litmus test for whether that culture is committed to justice.
A Christian Ethic for Criminal Justice
Martens builds from the most basic ethical principle: love. This tethers Christian ethics to Christian theology.
Our God, who is love, manifested that love in creating humans in his own likeness. When those human beings rebelled against God, God himself, in the second person of the Trinity, took on flesh and dwelt among us, died and rose again, and ascended into heaven. Jesus Christ defeated sin and death and, in love, saved his people from their power. In love, God sends his Holy Spirit to draw people to himself and to lead them into truth. The greatest commands in Scripture are to love God and love our neighbor.
From a thoughtful study of the foundational character of God’s love for Christian ethics, Martens moves to the increasingly concrete and particularized case of how to love our neighbors in America’s criminal justice system. This established focus on love helps us to see from the outset that we must consider everyone involved in criminal justice as persons—loved by God and, therefore, to be loved by us. Both the victim of crime and the perpetrator of crime are God’s creation and our neighbors. They are owed our respect and care and love. So too are those accused of crime, which Martens reminds us may or may not coincide with actual guilt.
This ethic of love leads to some subsidiary principles that Martens presents as cornerstones for evaluating criminal justice. He focuses on five: accuracy, due process, accountability, impartiality, and proportionality. As a Christian in the Reformed and Baptist theological traditions, Martens is not heavy-handed about his theological priors; readers from a wide range of theological traditions will find his analysis thoughtful. For those (like me) who share Martens’s theological persuasion, there’s the added bonus that Martens draws frequently from the rich Reformed and Baptist historical literature on law, politics, and government.
Applying the Ethic to Modern America
In the second half of the book, Martens applies these principles to the American criminal justice system. He takes key components of the American criminal justice system and describes them before providing ethical analysis. He covers an array of topics, such as jury selection, plea bargaining, sentencing, and more. They each receive a chapter-length treatment. Martens’s descriptions are clear enough that someone with no background knowledge can understand them. They’re also detailed enough that even someone trained in law is likely to learn something new.
Take for instance Martens’s analysis of plea bargaining. For anyone not regularly engaged in the practice of criminal law, the extent to which criminal justice depends on high-pressure negotiations between prosecutor and accused is likely to be surprising. Martens offers a clear and often troubling account. Take an individual (call him the defendant) who is accused of a serious crime—armed robbery. The defendant asserts his innocence. But a prosecutor tells him that he has a choice: he can plead guilty to a minor crime (some variety of theft), take a short sentence, and be done with it; or he can roll the dice on trial, in which case the prosecutor will seek to lock him up for decades. It’s not hard to see why some people who may in fact be innocent choose to plead guilty.
And that’s just the beginning. As Martens explains, there are many kinds of pressures on defendants to plead. By the time he’s done describing plea bargaining as it’s practiced today, it’s not hard to see why we should be concerned that this practice is not ideal for accuracy or due process.
Applying Ethical Principles Is Hard Work
No matter how theologically aligned, there will be points at which one might quibble. It takes work to apply Scripture to criminal justice. The Bible does not offer a point-by-point set of policy guidelines that can simply be enacted as a country’s criminal code. It does not say how to structure a police force, how to calculate the penalties for traffic offenses, whether marijuana ought to be regulated, how to conduct a criminal trial, or a host of other matters that each society must figure out.
It takes wisdom to apply the eternal principles of right and wrong to our society’s ever-changing situations. I’m not arguing for relativism, but how I express love to my children varies depending on whether I’m putting a toddler to bed, helping an older child with schoolwork, or dealing with a case of teenage disobedience. So with criminal justice generally.
Room for Future Work
With a subject so complex, readers may well come away with a list of questions that they wished were covered. No one book can address everything, but I’ll mention a few—not as a critique, but as food for further thought.
Mosaic law, for instance, comes up occasionally. Mosaic law does offer detailed legal analysis of specific crimes. Martens—rightly, and in line with the mainstream of interpretation throughout church history—recognizes that the civil law given by God at Sinai was specifically for Israel under the old covenant.
So, on the one hand, it would be a mistake to copy and paste Exodus directly into contemporary American law code. But on the other hand, it would equally be a mistake to ignore the divinely inspired application of God’s eternal truth and justice, even if the context is different from our own. This is the right way to think about the issue, in my view.
While Martens agrees that we can (with care) learn from Mosaic law, the book just scratches the surface of what we can learn from Mosaic law. More remains to unpack.[1] It takes careful work to exegete the text, consider its implications, and figure out what principles underlying the text may (or may not) apply in modern America.
Readers might also wish that the book considered more criminal justice reform proposals. Martens chooses to take the American criminal justice system as it exists and consider relatively modest reforms and critiques. For instance, he argues that plea bargaining as currently practiced is unjust. Similarly, he argues that love requires all reasonable means to establish guilt accurately and suggests that the death penalty as currently practiced has too high an error rate to be just.
These aren’t insignificant reforms. But there are no shortage of other (sometimes more radical) reform proposals that have circulated in the academic literature, such as an interest in abolishing prisons at one extreme, or replacing prison time with corporal punishment, or introducing more restitutionary remedies into criminal law. All of these provide options for fairly significant shifts from the current default paradigm. Are any of them workable? Wise? That can be debated; Martens doesn’t spend any time on these.
The book recognizes that respect and love for victims is an important part of biblical justice. However, it is light on analysis of how to love the victims of crime, other than to emphasize that it’s important to be accurate. (As Martens rightly points out, it’s no fairer to the victims than it is to the accused to lock up the wrong person!) One could imagine additional possible angles on the victims. How and when should courts take victims’ views into account during sentencing? What is the place for restitution in remedies?
Sometimes, readers may just disagree. Martens thinks that the death penalty as practiced in America is unjust. But he recognizes that Scripture would seem to allow for a death penalty. Is the solution a moratorium on all executions? Martens thinks so. But there can be good-faith reasons to differ about how to address real problems.
In the end, like any author, Martens had to make lots of choices about what to include. The book is already substantial; there’s no way to cover everything. And choosing to focus on a practical set of current issues rather than engaging with radical reform ideas is, I think, the right place to start. But there remains much work to be done in thinking through the issues and making decisions about what kinds of reform projects to pursue. It’s no fault of Martens’s book that there is still work to be done—it’s just to point out that this should be the start of the conversation, not the end. And when there are disagreements, the issues are worth debating.
If Martens has started the conversation, that is accomplishment enough. It’s well worth reading the book, regardless of whether readers will agree with Martens on all points.
A Service to the Church
Martens has also done a service to the church. Reforming Criminal Justice is a fine resource for Christians of all backgrounds who are serious about understanding law and government in light of Scripture. It may be most obviously relevant to those working in fields related to law or law enforcement. But it should be of interest to any Christian who is serious about loving our neighbors wisely and well in the area of law and public policy. Pastors in particular can find in this book a helpful source of insight on an important issue faced by communities across the country. And pastors will also find in this a helpful model for using Scripture and the rich tradition of Christian theological and ethical reflection on concrete matters of public policy. Pastor, you probably get these questions all the time; this book will help you in answering them.
While there’s no shortage of books purporting to offer a Christian perspective on government and politics, this book does something different, something harder to find. It offers a detailed Christian analysis of a specific policy question. And it does so in a way that is at once theologically rich and well-informed on the subject matter. If Scripture is God-breathed and sufficient to equip believers for all good works (2 Tim. 3:16), then it’s important that we seek to learn from it—not simply to shout slogans, but to think with Scripture through the nitty-gritty of policy and procedure. Martens provides an example of how to do that well.
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[1] For discussion on how to apply the Mosaic law to Christians, see, e.g., John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (John T. McNeill, ed., Ford Lewis Battles, trans.; Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 4.20.16; London Baptist Confession ch. 19 (1689); Walter C. Kaiser Jr., Toward Old Testament Ethics (Zondervan 1991); Andrew T. Walker, “Ethics through Covenant: A Primer on Progressive Covenantalism and Moral Theology (Part 1),” https://christoverall.com/article/concise/ethics-through-covenant-a-primer-on-progressive-covenantalism-and-moral-theology-part-1/; Jason S. DeRouchie, “Relating Moses’s Law to Christians,” https://www.9marks.org/article/relating-mosess-law-to-christians/.
