The use of Joseph’s silver cup story from the Bible as an example when instructing a jury was not inappropriate, an appellate court said.
by Massimo Introvigne
A 2021 decision by the Jamaica Court of Appeal, whose grounds have recently been published, discusses the interesting question whether instructions from a judge to a jury using language taken from the Bible breach constitutional principles of separation of church and state, and may mislead the jurors thus leading to an invalid decision.
The case concerned the homicide of a police officer. When instructing the jury, which eventually found a brother and a sister guilty of the homicide, the judge’s directions included these words: “[quote] Joseph commanded the steward of his house to fill the men’s sack with food, as much as they can carry, and they put each man’s money in the mouth of the sack. Put my cup, the silver cup, in the mouth of the sack of the youngest and his money for the grain, end of quote. When the cup was found there, Benjamin’s brothers hastily assumed that he must have stolen it.”
The judge took the story from Genesis 44. Benjamin was the youngest of the twelve sons of Jacob. The eleventh of the twelve sons was Joseph. Since Jacob had predicted that Joseph will one day rule over his ten elder brothers (in fact, half-brothers, since their mother and the mother of Jacob and Benjamin were different), the latter sold him to be taken to Egypt as a slave, and told their father he had gone missing. When in Egypt, thanks to his skills, Joseph ascended to the position of Vizier.
Later, during a famine, the ten elder brothers went to Egypt to buy food and met the Vizier. They did not recognize Joseph, but Joseph did recognize them. He asked that they go back home and return bringing with them also their younger half-brother Benjamin, whose name they had mentioned, to prove their veracity. After they did, and paid for the food, Joseph gave to each brother a sack with food and, without telling them, he also gave back to them their money distributing it in the sacks. In the sack of Benjamin, he ask his steward to hide his silver cup, then had the same steward discover it and arrest Benjamin as a thief.
Joseph’s motivations are controversial among Biblical scholars. Perhaps his idea was to keep Benjamin with him in Egypt. He told the brothers the boy had committed a crime and will be enslaved. When one of the elder brothers, Judah, offered himself to be enslaved in the place of young Benjamin, Joseph realized that his brothers had learned their lesson, revealed who he was, set all free, and even introduced them to the Pharaoh.
The Jamaican judge used the parable to tell jurors to be careful in assessing circumstantial evidence. From the fact that Joseph’s silver cup was found in Benjamin’s sack one could have concluded that Benjamin was guilty, while in fact he was innocent.
Actually, the judge’s remarks were not hostile to the defendants, as the jurors were reminded that evidence against the accused brother and sister was circumstantial, and Benjamin’s story demonstrates that circumstantial evidence may be misleading.
However, the lawyer for the sister insisted that “the principles applicable to religious thinking is extraneous to judicial decision making and it was improper and inappropriate, whether the learned judge used the biblical parable for the purpose of illustrating the effect of jumping to conclusions or for identifying with the jury and thus treating the matter as a moral issue. The effect of this was that the learned judge rendered the trial unfair and imbalanced and as a result the conviction was unsafe.”
The Court of Appeal disagreed. It stated that, “The well-known biblical narrative of Joseph and the sack with the silver cup, could not, with any sense or reason, be considered to have run the risk of negatively impacting the jury, as regards their duty to assess the evidence with fairness.” The judge “did not present the jury with any moral issue to be resolved on the basis of a particular religious standard.
They were being asked to assess the circumstantial evidence presented by the Crown, whether they could be sure that it compelled them to one conclusion, the guilt of each applicant. The words that preceded the impugned biblical narrative, were words by the learned judge warning the jury that, although circumstantial evidence could be conclusive, it must be closely examined because evidence of the kind could be fabricated to cast suspicion on another,” as it happened in Benjamin’s story.
The appellate court concluded that the use of a Biblical story, which is similar to other stories found in the world’s literature, did not prejudice the jury against the defendants. If anything, “the narrative would only have inured to the benefit of the applicant [the woman accused of murder] as a warning to the jury of the dangers of accepting circumstantial evidence without careful analysis.” The appeal failed.