My mind has turned today to those who are executed for murder in America even though they have said 'sorry' and even though they may have confessed a new faith in Christ. Many people think such people should have their sentence reduced because they claim to have repented and come to God whilst in prison. I don' t want to address the question of capital punishment here but do want to consider the more general question as to whether courts should reduce sentences for those who say sorry. There is no doubt that some people have been wonderfully converted and changed by being brought to Christ in prison. 

In my former congregation we had a young man speak to our Youth Fellowship. He had been involved in horrific behaviour and after serving sentences in Young Offender institutions found himself in prison. After his prison sentence was over that he went back to drugs. Almost at the end of his tether he turned to Christ and found a complete transformation. He had a vision of Christ and found all the guilt and drug addiction gone. It was a wonderful story of the grace of God that impressed us all. 
However he had served his sentence for the crimes he had committed. 

Both the Old and New Testament make a distinction between, on the one hand, our behaviour to one another in personal relationships where we should be forgiving, turning the other cheek, and, on the other hand, the God given duty of the State to punish the wrongdoer. God does not want the State to let off criminals who say sorry for that would leave the justice system open to widespread abuse. 

Of course in this life there can be no perfect justice. Nowadays people appeal from one court to another. Our House of Lords used to be the highest court. However now one can go as far as the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. There is though an even higher court, before which those who have been executed have now appeared. It is the court before which all judges too as well as all of us must stand. 
The difference between the Judge of that court and judges of the courts on earth is twofold. First, He knows all the facts including the advantages and disadvantages each of us have had in life. Second, He loves us all and has at great personal cost to Himself provided a way for us to be forgiven and changed. This distinguishes God's forgiveness from other alleged forms of Divine Mercy.
In this life we make the choice as to whether we accept that love.  If we choose rightly now then there will be `no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus'. It is that knowledge of the great-undeserved love of God to us that most helps us in our personal relationships to forgive one another as God has forgiven us.

This very reasonable belief that there is a life beyond this one - where the wrongs of this life are put right and the wicked punished is necessary to give meaning to our earthly lives. Without such a belief we will be in danger of two opposite mistakes:
1. In believing that this life is everything, so much value would be placed on happiness and pleasure now, that courts would be reluctant to punish criminals and also risk taking would be frowned upon. 
2. In believing that this life is everything we could spend our few uncertain days in a frantic search for happiness - a happiness which would necessarily elude us. The sheer meaninglessness of life would eventually extinguish all sense of value and therefore morality. The powerful would rule according to their desires - though at first they would do it in the name of such concepts as 'human rights'. This would inevitably lead to a selfish, grab all you can, society which would begin to deny its citizens free speech and finally degenerate into totalitarianism.