Remorse Apology and Mercy

I. INTRODUCTION

It is commonly even if not universally believed that the very worst of evildoers are those who are utterly without remorse for the evil that they have done an absence often understandably inferred from their unwillingness to express remorse by apologizing or begging forgiveness or by their not engaging in appropriate non-verbal expressive behavior seeking out punishment, for example. Such absence of remorse may, in the words of Wislawa Szymborska, be a “sign of bestiality” or, in the phrase of Seamus Heaney, reveal them as “malignant by nature.” In the legal world, such judgments can be found at various points in the criminal process—where absence of remorse may be cited as an aggravating factor that legitimately should incline us to greater harshness and certainly not to greater compassion or mercy. Here are a few examples one from a clemency decision, one from a prosecuting attorney’s argument at the sentencing stage of a criminal trial, one from a trial judge justifying a sentence, one from a