This HYPERthetical situation involves a man who was wrongfully convicted and served twenty-five years for a crime he did not commit. When DNA evidence finally surfaces to exonerate him, he is released and, surprisingly, he reveals his complicity in multiple crimes while he was in prison, including possible murder, rape, animal abuse, drug dealing, and theft. The man was never charged with these crimes since he was not caught and/or there was not enough evidence to charge him. As head of the penal system, I face a choice: with the understanding that this man has committed these acts, do I release him back into society or hold and charge him with these new crimes?

After carefully pondering this highly fascinating thought experiment, I would reluctantly decide to release the man back into society. He is essentially right in claiming, “Prison is a different culture. I did what I had to do to survive.” The penal system failed the man in the first place. If we look at the situation as being comparable to the biblical Original Sin (i.e., the idea that all sin originated from one act of incipient transgression), the crimes that the man supposedly perpetrated afterward all resonate from that initial failure; therefore, the man should not be held accountable for these new crimes.

The idea of Original Sin is based off of the Christian Doctrine regarding Adam and Eve and the biblical Garden of Eden. In essence, the story relates that God warned Adam and Eve not to eat of the Tree of Forbidden Fruit, and yet they were tempted by the devil to betray God’s doctrine and eat of the forbidden apple anyway. This one original act both banished Adam and Eve from the Garden and, in a derivative sense, doomed all of humanity to mortality. Without turning this thought experiment into a biblical argument, it is helpful to use this idea of Original Sin to help make a moral decision. The Original Sin in this case is the penal system’s failure to properly convict the person who committed the original crime. Everything that came after, i.e., the wrongful imprisonment, the prison crimes, etc., can be traced back to this one failure.

Therefore, the man should not be held accountable for the crimes committed in prison, since he never should have been there in the first place. The fault here predominately lies with our penal system, not with the man, who is an individual victim within the overarching machinations of a system that is out of his control. I am not absolving the man of these supposed crimes, if they did, indeed, occur. These alleged crimes, i.e., rape, murder, animal abuse, drug dealing, etc., are not to be taken lightly. However, we simply cannot hold and convict a man for crimes that happened while he was erroneously imprisoned in the first place. Also, we do not know the circumstances of these crimes. It is possible that he acted in self-defense with regard to the murders and the animal abuse, with more gray area pertaining to the charges of rape and drug dealing. We just simply do not know enough facts to hold the man from rejoining the society that he was mistakenly taken from. The problem lies with the penal system, which is where the “Original Sin” occurred.

Now, we cannot simply disregard the contrarian view of this situation, i.e., the idea that we might potentially be releasing a murderer and rapist back into society where he might harm innocent civilians. If this were the case, we would have blood on our hands. However, this man was, initially, one of those innocent civilians, and we cannot simply throw away the man’s entire life because of the things he may or may not have done while he was wrongly imprisoned. The Original Sin, in this case, lies with the penal system, and everything that came after traces back to that wrongful incarceration; therefore, we cannot compound the failure of this system by further holding a man back from the ability to live a meaningful and free life.