Tapu Misa: In tragedies such as these, forgiveness is indeed divine

In my mind I had him hung, drawn and quartered. That was when he was a faceless young man who'd driven three girls to their deaths, plunging 20m into the Waikato River, before freeing himself and going home to change and sleep, not once calling the police.

So when John Forbes, the father and grandfather of two of the dead girls spoke to the Herald about forgiveness, I wasn't sure the driver deserved it. "Although we will grieve forever, it is still not as bad as what the young man who was driving has to live with for the rest of his life," he said. "I feel for him and I pray for him."

I admired that, even as I doubted my own ability to feel as forgiving, had that been my 14-year-old in the river. I'm not sure I could have admitted, even to myself, as Forbes did: "My girls had choices. They chose to enter this vehicle."

But then I saw the remorseful young driver, Whiti Hepi, on Paul Holmes on Monday night - the shame, guilt and pain etched into his bowed head, the way he couldn't lift his downcast eyes - I understood exactly what John Forbes meant.

Two things struck me. First, how much easier it is to be merciful and forgiving of someone when you can relate to them on some level (witness the sympathetic jury finding last December for the Nelson father who killed his severely disabled baby daughter).

And secondly how rare it is these days to hear someone talk openly about forgiveness, especially in the face of such heart-wrenching loss. It's not something we expect in this litigious, unforgiving society.

We don't forgive slights, let alone larger transgressions. We are encouraged to hold people accountable, to seek redress for everything, to feel aggrieved when we're wronged, to nurture our rage over the most inconsequential of "wrongs" - whether it's being cheated out of a carpark or being cut off in traffic.

Forgiveness has come to be seen as a sign of weakness; a quaint, old-fashioned concept with little use in this age. The talkback age, as Chief Justice Sian Elias called it last week, which favours black-and-white solutions to complex problems, such as harsher sentences for "them" baddies out there who transgress against "us" good folk in here.

Yet, as John Forbes showed even in the midst of his grief, the idea that forgiveness is not only divine but healing isn't yet dead - though I'm inclined to the view that it's not as deeply embedded in mainstream New Zealand society as in other cultures.

The year before last, my 4-year-old niece was killed on a busy Otara road. Her family was visiting friends, but she was asleep when they got there, so her father stayed with her in the car. He was asleep when she woke up and let herself out of the car and into the path of a car. A woman motorist, who was on her cellphone at the time, didn't see her in time to stop.

I watched her mother at the funeral, driven almost mad with grief. Yet afterwards, she and my brother-in-law wanted to make contact with the driver to wish her well and tell her that they didn't hold her responsible. It was a tragic accident, which might have been prevented had the father not fallen asleep, had the driver not been on her cellphone. But their little girl was gone, and the last thing they wanted was for the driver to suffer any more than she already had.

A few years ago in Samoa, Maiava Visekota Peteru, the widow of a murdered cabinet minister, pleaded for clemency for her husband's killers after they were convicted and sentenced to hang. The sentences were commuted to life, as all death sentences had been since 1962. "Taking another person's life is not the way to go," Maiava said at the time. "We have spoken strongly about forgiving." The healing process was important for her children, she added.

This isn't surprising in a society like Samoa, where apology and forgiveness have reached a kind of art form through the ifoga, in which contrition and reconciliation are played out independently of the justice system.

The ifoga involves the family of an offender gathering its members up and presenting themselves, before dawn, at the house of the offended, thereupon to sit, heads bowed in shame and sorrow, exposing themselves to the elements and whatever physical harm the wronged party might feel inclined to inflict upon them. And there they sit for hours, sometimes days in rare cases, until forgiveness is given and reconciliation completed.

As an elder once explained to me: "There is a bond that connects people, and when that connection is broken, whether by murder or some other serious crime, you have to repair it."

Which brings me to another reason many in our talkback society find it so easy to demand ever-harsher sentences, despite strong evidence they don't work (and, no, I'm not arguing against all punishment, or long sentences for the most serious offenders).

It's that lack of connection, the sense that offenders aren't real people with real families but monsters for whom society bears no responsibility. (Is it a coincidence that the average prison muster increased by 99 per cent between 1985 and 1999?)

Forensic psychologist Nigel Latta put his finger on the problem when he told Paul Holmes last week: "We want to think they're different from us, but they're not. They are us."