When Grief Becomes a Civic Act
I was called for jury duty this week. When I entered the courtroom, I saw a Black man in his fifties standing beside his lawyer. The judge read the charge ~ strangulation ~ and grief welled up in me along with tears. Not for the charge. For the pattern. For the weight of what it means to watch yet another Black man standing in the stocks.
The judge saw my tears when I privately explained why I had raised my hand on the “neutrality” question she had read to us ~ that I couldn’t contribute to the punishment or imprisonment of another such person ~ and she excused me. I was shaking for an hour afterward.
The man was pleading innocent. That detail lodged in me too ~ the whole impossible architecture of it. Who is telling the truth? Who is lying, and why? And then the harder question beneath that: in a system where the punishment is so catastrophic, lying for one’s life is not a moral failing. It is a survival instinct. A schema that offers only extreme consequences does not invite honesty. It forces strategy. And sometimes it punishes the innocent alongside ~ or instead of ~ the guilty.
Before our entirely white jury was called in, we watched an orientation video about the jury system ~ and I was surprised at the lump in my throat watching it. Something in it genuinely moved me. The reminder that we live in a country where citizens, not monarchs or generals, determine the fate of the accused. That this is not nothing. That in many parts of the world, this right does not exist. I felt the founding fathers’ vision as something real and hard-won.
And yet. The vision the founders held was luminous yet incomplete. They got the democracy right. They missed the other important question: What do we do to restore rather than simply to punish?
What the Marys Say
I have long walked with the presences I know as the Marys ~ the biblical Marys, yes, but also the archetypal feminine principle that weeps at the tombs of the punished ~ be they rightly or wrongly accused.
The Marys would say: True justice is not about erasing any of the wounds that lead to wrong action. It is about tending them ~ for the one harmed, for the one who caused harm, for the community that holds them both.
The Marian impulse has always been toward restoration: the return of the broken to wholeness, not the disposal of the broken into shadow. A justice shaped by this force would ask not only what did this person do ~ but what made this possible, and what does healing require of all of us?
What the Pleiades Offer
The Pleiadian perspective ~ as I understand it through the field ~ holds that civilizations advance not by perfecting punishment, but by evolving consciousness. A truly advanced society does not merely suppress harmful behavior. It traces the wound back to its source: the poverty, the trauma, the systemic exclusion that set the conditions long before any single act occurred.
From this perspective, institutionalized racism is not a flaw in an otherwise functional system. It is the architecture. It was built into the original blueprint ~ in who counted as a full person, whose land was whose, whose labor was compensated and whose was taken. What was built into the bone cannot be healed at the surface.
True justice, the Pleiades suggest, would include restorative circles, where harm is addressed in the presence of a full community rather than extracted into a subset of it. In this, healing becomes the sentence, where those who have caused hurt are given the conditions to understand why, and to make repair. And the pipeline from poverty to prison is dismantled upstream, not managed downstream.
The Cost the System Does Not Count
A dear friend of mine served on a jury two years ago. The case involved a Black man charged with murder. The evidence suggested likely guilt ~ and yet there was a shade of doubt. Following the strict instructions of the judge as to how to handle the evidence with as much neutrality as possible, he and his fellow jurors convicted the man to life imprisonment. As the sentence was read, many of them wept. Regular people ~ neighbors, parents, workers ~ white people who did not want to close a Black man into a cage forever, and yet saw no other path the law had left them.
My friend has PTSD from the experience. The man, it emerged later, had a record that suggested without serious intervention he would have cycled back into drug-related crime. The tragedy was total: for him, for his victim, for the jurors asked to be the final instrument of a system that offered only one blunt tool ~ permanent removal. There was no option for the genuine reckoning, the wise path toward something other than loss on all sides.
This is what we do not talk about enough: the system harms its own instruments, too. The jurors. The public defenders. The overworked judges. The corrections officers. It conscripts ordinary compassionate people into a machinery of finality and then releases them back into their lives carrying what they were never equipped to hold.
What We Can Do
I extricated myself. That was my small act. This was not abandonment, it was my Marian assessment of my true role in this drama. My tears and my grief were not objectivity’s enemy but rather a heartfelt and autonomic cry against a structure that unfortunately was not objective. The courtroom did not need one more person performing neutrality they did not feel.
What else can we do, those of us who feel this and are not legislators or lawyers or activists by vocation? We can begin with honesty: naming what we see, in spaces where it is safe to name it ~ and I was grateful at least to have that safety in my local courtroom.
For those called it it, we can support restorative justice organizations working at the local level ~ many cities now have community-based alternatives to prosecution for nonviolent offenses. We can ask our representatives, concretely, what their position is on pretrial diversion, on restorative courts, on rehabilitation funding. We can refuse the story that punishment equals justice, every time it is told to us as though it were obvious.
We can tend to one another ~ the friend with PTSD, the neighbor who served and was never the same, the person in our community who came home from prison and found every door closed. The Marys did not wait for the system to roll the stone away. They went themselves, in the early morning, carrying what they had. We can do the same. We go. We witness. We carry what we have. And we tell what we find on the other side.
I am telling. And I am praying. For that man who may or may not have been guilty, and who was handed whatever verdict coagulated in the field. And that we may raise our consciousness as a collective so that justice and healing become one.
Yes l agree with your prioritorizing healing and restoration over punishment and imprisonment
thank you for sharing
May we all work to become conscious and aware human beings to bring transformation into our systems
Yes, Lyn, may it be so!
Bless you, Margarite, I had a similar experience in 2016, change the course of my life. I decided to move my career into a pathway that would solely focus on social justice and healing work. I pray we move to a system of greater equality, harmony, with restitution for the past there must be a reconciliation.
Sending more love to the world, with a prayer of inviting every human being to move up one level and consciousness, imagine what that would do for our world?
Maryanne, bless YOU for doing that work.
I so agree with you. I have thought about this for years. I see the only avenue available is punishment. Our society is based on punishment. It came over with the Puritans. We can also see the injustice. As we watch the Epstein class get away with everything and those without are given prison.
I agree that its built into the system we have now. It also goes for the people fleeing repression or violence in their homeland and reach our borders. We have to look to why this is happening and go to those communities and restore equanimity. Its a big ask and it takes seriously looking to change how our society is structured. The class warfare is built into to this system. It does not have to be this way.
Thank you, Kathleen. Yes, one class gets away with crimes beyond measure, and the victimized classes swirl in wounding from the system. Although we all have personal choice, sometimes the system is just too much for one person to manage the depths of what’s tormenting them.
Having experienced trauma and abuse at the hands of men of more than one race, the answer to this issue is complex. Most perpetrators are not capable of doing the kind of work that you are suggesting in this post. My perpetrators have included white, black and Latino men in the United States, Mexico and Belize. I have had to do the work of healing without their cooperation or involvement. Law enforcement has failed to intervene even when the crimes were reported in a timely manner. I was only able to seek legal justice in one case with a white man who abused me when I was 14. By the time I received a monetary settlement, it was 50 years after the rape.
I truly wish for a world where restorative justice is a reality. It can be a long painful and lonely journey for survivors who are doing the healing without a community.
We have finally made it to the East Coast to live near Emily and her husband. They are in Northwestern New Jersey near areas of Pennsylvania. We are looking for a new home in this area.
Sending love.
Yes, Mel, it’s really complex. In meditation today I asked Mother Mary how we fix the system, and I heard: One person healing at a time.
Marguerite, this just really opened me up! We need Divine Feminine healing in this world and I know you are helping to bring that to the world! Thank you for a very vulnerable and honest sharing of your experience and your thoughtful comments on what it meant to you and to the world!
Thank you, Anna. 🙂
For anyone looking for ways to mirror a system that works on improving the criminal system, I post two articles (just to cover fact bases) regarding emptying prisons in the Netherlands. I lived there for 9 years and it’s amazing to see a culture that believes in rehabilitation and mental health (not just for criminals). I sense that if we can keep on increasing awareness of mental health it too may one day be able to spill into the prison systems (more).
https://www.positive.news/society/the-empty-prisons-being-put-to-good-use-in-the-netherlands/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/14/netherlands-prisons-dutch-sentencing
Thank you, Kristy Lee. I also know there is at least one African culture that takes an offender into a circle and offers council, healing, witnessing. My friend Maura McCarley Torkildson also is part of a program in CA for the formerly incarcerated, and she has brought in trauma-informed methods to helping these people.
“. A truly advanced society does not merely suppress harmful behavior. It traces the wound back to its source:”…and then “tends” to that wound.
This is so culturally conditioned into us, on this larger societal level, and right down to our individual levels, where we are taught the same process. Silence and suppress the wounds. Instead of mindfully and lovingly excavating their root causes.
You have articulated such a wise and insightful perspective. It has so many applications. Including how to approach our internalized trauma, how to heal our physical illnesses, and how to relate to each other.
And on an even more vast level, this demonizing, blaming, punishing, and silencing is what has been done to the Divine Mother.
Great insights, Jodine! Thank you. May we all heal.
Marguerite – Love and thanks to you for this stirring post. Angela Davis had much to say about the need for the current criminal injustice system to be completely dismantled/reconfigured. If I remember correctly, when asked how that could be accomplished, she said that each case should be dealt with individually, requiring a much more personal approach.
Jean, she’s so wise, and I’m sure many many folks have been advocating for this kind of thing for quite some time. Thanks for writing. xo
Thank you Marguerite for starting this conversation 🙏
Illuminating in a comprehensive way–legally, morally, emotionally, spiritually. You weave the wisdom of the Divine Mother, the Marys and Magdalenes with whom you have walked for so many years. You’ve given us a paradigm shifting view of how our legal system could deliver justice that is not blind, but imbued with visionary wisdom and love.
Thank you for your beautiful reflection, Vajra!
I agree with you, Marguerite 100% we need restorative justice way more than criminal justice. Our system is far far far far far from perfect.
In September I will be in a courtroom for a jury trial, unless the defendant leads guilty before before then. I believe I’ve told you about this case in which our life savings were stolen along with those of five other victims of this fraudulent scheme.
I have no idea how a community that practiced restorative justice would handle this, but I would imagine the trial would be or the proceedings would be much much more validating and fulfilling for all parties involved.
I’m not looking forward to the trial. Will let you know how it goes. Thank you for sharing your experience and I have a feeling I would be in the same position under similar circumstances as you.🙏
Blessings to you, Laura!
The law by which we are mean to abide is American Common Law not the legal structure imposed upon us through the capet bagger courts post Civil Mercenary Conflict (not war). In American Common Law we do work to restore a man or woman to their wholeness. This is the path of moving ourselves back to the correct jurisdiction – on the land and soil. Post Civil War and beyond we were strategically moved without our knowledge into the jurisdiction of the sea and hence became subject to these courts which are meant to only govern British Territorial employees which are known as United States Citizens. We are not meant to be US Citizens. We are meant to be Americans. There are many of us who are working to restore these American Common Law courts through The American State Assemblies. As the Coordinator for The Wyoming Assembly, we are actively working to establish our Jural Assembly which administers American Common Law. Nearly all other states are working to do the same through The American State Assemblies. https://tasa.americanstatenationals.org/ This is one other way to take action. That all being said…my heart very much goes out to you in your experience. I recently was called to jury duty. I was able to file a complaint against the court for mis-identifying me. I was excused. Extremely crazy times. Hope this is interesting to some! So much love to you Marguerite and I love this post. Thank you for sharing your experience.
Fascinating, Margaret, and thank you!
Sounds like all the right things are happening. Keep it up!