Steven Charles Phillips walked into a Dallas courtroom Tuesday morning wearing an ankle bracelet of a dangerous sex offender. 

“Hallelujah!  Cut that thing off!” a supporter hollered as the bracelet was removed at the conclusion of an emotional hearing. 

The story in the Dallas Morning News includes a brief video featuring representatives from the Innocence Project, Mr. Phillips, his girlfriend and his mother.  Phillips, like most of the innocent people who have done hard time in the Texas prison system, talks about God a lot.  Tragically, few churches have wrestled honestly with the dynamics of mass incarceration and its twin sister, wrongful conviction.  Ironically, those who take these issues most seriously are often non-religious.  Justice is a recurring theme in the Bible, but since the law-and-order 80s Christians have done their best to pretend it ain’t so.  No wonder those who care most about justice have been leaving the fold.

This needs to end.  Christians must start listening to their Bibles.  God loves the poor, demands justice, and holds accountable those who casually toss away human life.   

The exoneration of Steven Phillips returns national attention to a distressing string of DNA exonerations in Dallas County.  It could be argued that the criminal justice system in this North Texas town has contributed to the embarrassing pageant of once-young men who have spent up to a quarter century behind bars.  For decades, Dallas justice was notoriously corrupt . . . and damn proud of it! 

Dallas County still has an underfunded criminal justice system; but nobody cares more deeply about judicial fairness than current DA Craig Watkins.  Without the cooperation of public officials like Watkins we wouldn’t be seeing this glorious, and deeply disturbing, parade of exonerees. 

This isn’t a Dallas problem.  Not every prisoner claiming innocence is telling the truth; but many of them are.  How many, no one knows.  Our national embrace of mass incarceration has lowered the evidentiary bar, streamlining the conviction process and tripling the prison population.  Steven Phillips reminds us that we pay a staggering price for the sloppy and self-deluded prosecutors a distorted system has created.