bitter irony

You've probably heard or read about the man who caused a huge train accident in LA when he parked his SUV on the tracks.
Apparently, he intended to commit suicide by letting the train hit him in his vehicle. At the last moment, however, he changed his mind and exited the vehicle. When the train hit the empty vehicle, it derailed and headed straight for an oncoming train going in the other direction, hit that train, and finally crashed into an empty, "parked" freight train.
The man has been charged with 10 counts of murder for deaths sustained in the crash, and the D.A. has included "special circumstances" in the charges which makes him eligible for the death penalty.
This case is certainly tragic, and I do not in any way want to say that the horrific results of this man's thoughtless, self-centered, and inhuman act do not merit the harshest penalties that society hands out in these cases. I also do not want to use this case as a place to debate the death penalty... well, not really.
I do want to take this example and use it as an opportunity to discuss the idea of "justice" in our society, and to hold it up against what the word "justice" actually means.
In our society, we have courts and a legal system that are designed to deliver justice. In some cases, justice involves compensation to an injured party for damages sustained. By and large, this compensation takes a monetary form, even if the original damages were not monetary in nature. "Justice" is done when the perpetrator renders back to their victim a sum of money equal in value to the amount of harm that they caused.
Obviously, we're going to run into problems when the damages were not monetary in nature. If I stole $5,000 from you, it would be just if you returned $5,000 to me (plus interest, I suppose, to make it neater). But what if it was not money that was lost, but a limb, or a life, or an opportunity, time, or trust? Can the courts mandate a return to the victim of the 3 years with their children they lost because of false imprisonment, or the ability to cheerfuly give to a charity without fear of it being a swindle, or the lost moments of holding an infant daughter because of the loss of a limb, or her life lost because of an industrial accident, or his life lost because of pollutants poisoning the groundwater, or the life of a child lost because of a drunk driver? We award vast sums of money, because ultimately, that is the limit of what our justice system can do. We don't have the ability to execute real justice and return the irreplacable items, time, experiences or people who have been lost, so we just keep piling on the money, blinding ourselves to our impotence to right wrongs in any sort of meaningful way.
In other cases, we seek "justice" by punishing those who have done wrong in other ways: by taking away their liberty in jail or in subtler ways (e.g. restricting their freedom of employment, voting, travel, etc.), or by even taking their lives, in the most severe cases.
In these cases, I think that reasonable people can hold the opinion that some people actually deserve to lose their lives because of the intense evil of their actions, and that to end their lives is an act of "justice," by which I mean rendering unto someone the appropriate consequence which their actions merit. The trouble is, that's only half of justice. The other half would render back to their victims their lives or innocence, or expunge their past from pain and awful memories. Isn't this what they deserve? Alas, it is not in our power to do these things.
What results is a justice system that is lopsided. In seeking to restore the balance of justice and put things back to the way they ought to be, we find that the only way we can try to balance the scales is to heap death and imprisonment onto one side of the scales, since we are unable to remove it from the other. In the final analysis, we cannot erase the scars of evil, but we can spread it's gruesome consequences back onto the perpetrators.
I'm not saying that this is wrong, and we should never do anything. I'm saying that it's the best we can do, and we should always be mournful and dissatisfied with human efforts. And I think we should be more humble, too. It's in our nature to want to... actually, to need to do something, anything to pursue justice when we see things that are so obviously not the way they're supposed to be. We need to realize that our best efforts are not enough, and often, our best efforts just make things worse.
There's a great moment in the Lord of the Rings (the book, not the movie... okay it's in the movie, too, but it was in the book first!) Where Frodo tells Gandalf that he thinks that Gollum deserves to die. Gandalf replies that he's probably right... but there are also many that die who deserve life. "Can you give it to them? Do not be so swift to hand out pain and death, Master Frodo."
The "Bitter Irony" I reference in my header is that this man in LA decided to park his car on the railroad tracks because he wanted to end his life. Even though he changed his mind at the last minute, wounds on his wrists and chest indicate that this was not his only failed attempt, and will likely not be his last. Ironically, the most "justice" we can mete out as society is to do for this man what he desired to do but found himself unable to do, that is, to end his life, while doing nothing to restore the lives of his victims. This is the uppermost limit of human justice. Don't you long for something more?

- "He says that he also is a king, and he also will not listen to what you say."