It’s this week’s PSA (or Public Service Announcement). Doing the right thing can have a lasting positive effect on your health and wellbeing. When you don’t do the right thing, the damage can be permanent. Exhibit #1: Marty Stroud, whose face you see below. Mr. Stroud, through a combination of arrogance, laziness, prejudice and dereliction of duty, helped send an innocent man to death row. This happened in 1984. Thirty years later, it still bothered him. As he said, “Facts are stubborn things. They do not go away.” Neither does a troubled conscience. Meanwhile, the wrongly convicted man, Glenn Ford, languished on death row for 30 years. Why so long? Because he never gave up. He never stopped fighting to prove his innocence. The miscarriage of justice permanently scarred Glenn Ford and his family. His now-established innocence robbed the murder victim’s family of the “closure” they thought they had. His careless conviction could very well trouble the consciences of the jurors whose vote confined him to a cage for the past thirty years. And even after more than 30 years, it certainly has left its scars on Marty Stroud, who led the charge not merely for Mr. Ford’s conviction, but also for his execution.
This is not a PSA about judicial malfeasance or to open a debate about the death penalty. It’s a sobering message about what happens when we ignore the inner voice of right and wrong, what Van Gogh called “man’s compass.” As one philosopher noted about the conscience, once it is offended, farewell to a tranquil mind. As Mr. Stroud demonstrates, the pangs of guilt don’t go away after ten years, or even twenty or thirty.
Always doing the right thing, on the other hand, is the recipe for a clear conscience, the softest pillow made.
