Not Guilty, But Still Wrong

In 1955, twelve men took just over an hour to reach a verdict. By every legal standard of that time and place, the matter was settled. Case closed. And yet, more than seventy years later, almost no one believes justice was done. Why not? Nobody handed us a rulebook, and the law itself said the opposite. So where did that conviction come from? Today we're looking at a story you may think you know, and perhaps a feeling you've never had to explain. I think that feeling is trying to tell us something much bigger than the story itself.

Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday, this is episode #722, “Not Guilty, But Still Wrong.” I’m Darrell Darnell, I have never been called to serve for jury duty, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.

Well, technically speaking I did get called once to serve in Oklahoma county, but I was living in Lubbock county Texas at the time, so my summons was dismissed.

I want to tell you a story. While I tell it, I'd like you to pay attention to what's happening inside you. Not what you're thinking. What you're feeling.

In August of 1955, a 14-year-old boy named Emmett Till left Chicago to spend part of his summer with relatives in a tiny Mississippi town called Money. He was a city kid, a little cocky maybe, the way 14-year-olds can be. I think about my own kids at that age, how big they thought they were and how little they actually understood about the world. Emmett was just a boy.

One day at a small grocery store, something happened between Emmett and the white woman working the counter. People have argued for decades about exactly what. Whatever it was, it was nothing close to what came next. A few nights later, her husband and his half-brother came to the home where Emmett was staying, took him out of bed in the middle of the night, and drove away with him.

They beat him so badly that his own family could barely recognize him. They killed him. Then they sank his body in a river, weighed down so it would never be found. It was found anyway.

His mother, Mamie, made a decision that helped change the country. She insisted on an open casket. She wanted the world to see what had been done to her boy. Thousands came to look, and a photograph of him ran in Jet magazine.

Then came the trial. The jury was all white and all male, because women and Black citizens were disenfranchised and essentially barred from serving. The jury deliberated for 67 minutes. One of the jurors later said, "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long." The verdict: not guilty. Both men walked free.

About four months later, those two men sold their story to Look magazine for what would be roughly $50,000 today. They described, in their own words, what they had done. And nobody could do a thing about it. Because of double jeopardy, you can't be tried twice for the same crime. They were declared innocent, and then they got paid to explain how guilty they were.

Now stop and check yourself. What are you feeling? If you're like me, there's heat in your chest. Maybe a knot in your stomach. Maybe you're angry at those men who died decades ago, men you never met.

So here's the question I want us to consider today. What, exactly, are you angry about?

The law said not guilty. Twelve citizens said not guilty. By every legal measure, and by the measure of that county in that year, no crime was proven. And yet you and I, and I'd bet nearly everyone listening, know with total certainty that a terrible wrong was done. Nobody had to teach you that. No one had to hand you a verse or a textbook. You just knew.

A while back on my other podcast, Entering the Fifth Dimension, my co-host Robert and I discussed a Twilight Zone episode from 1964 called "I Am the Night—Color Me Black." Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone, wrote that episode. Our guest that night was Rodney Barnes. He is a Peabody award winning television writer and producer. I don’t know Rodney’s personal beliefs, but Robert has stated on multiple occasions that he is agnostic.

That Twilight Zone episode was prompted by the assassination of President Kennedy, but Rod Serling had been wrestling with the Emmett Till case for years. He’d tried working it into other scripts but the network wouldn’t let him. Rod was frustrated by the social issues of his day and you can feel it.

In the story, a town waits for an execution of a man named Jagger, a white man found guilty of killing a racist bigot. The entire town is in a fever pitch to see the man who killed a bigot hanged. Mysteriously, the town sits in darkness, the sun did not rise on this day.

Then a Black minister steps in front of the crowd and tells them, "You hated and you killed. Now there's not one of you who isn't doomed. Do you know why it's dark? It's the hate he felt, the hate you felt, the hate all of us feel, and there's too much of it.”

As we talked about that episode, nobody in the conversation, believer, agnostic, or otherwise, shrugged and said, "Well, that's just how that town saw it." Rodney called the decision to tell a story like that "a gutsy move" and "the right thing to do."

Right. Not "popular." Not "profitable." Right. The truth is, we were all quietly leaning on a standard none of us had written. We agreed that what Rod had done and written was right, but by what standard were we basing that?

That heat in your chest is not a quirk of your personality. It's evidence, and it's pointing at something. Following where it points is what I want to talk about today. This is the moral argument for God. Today we’re not zeroing in on a specific God. We’re not arguing for the God of the Bible. We’re not talking about Jesus. Those are separate questions, separate challenges, and we'll get to them in future episodes. For now, we're asking one foundational question: Is there a standard of right and wrong that sits above us, or isn't there?

C.S. Lewis opens Mere Christianity with this very observation. He points to the way people quarrel. He writes that quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong, and that there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are.

It’s common to hear people say things like, "That's just your opinion," or "Who are you to judge?" But notice when those statements typically show up. People typically say them when they're the ones being corrected. Let that same person get cheated on a deal, or lied about, or cut off in traffic, and the language changes in a hurry. Suddenly it's, "That's not fair." "You promised." "You had no right." Even "Don't judge me" is a judgment about judging. Everyone is appealing to a rule they assume the other person knows too.

C.S. Lewis calls this the Law of Human Nature. He also takes on the objection that it's just instinct. Our instincts, he says, are like the notes on a piano. The moral law is not one of the notes. It's the sheet music that tells us which notes to play and which to leave alone. Sometimes the right thing is the quieter instinct, and sometimes we have to choose against the louder one. Something has to be doing the judging, and that something isn't one of the things being judged.

So let's test where this standard could come from. Maybe it comes from the law. But in Mississippi in 1955, the law protected those men and said no wrong had been committed. Maybe it comes from the majority. But the majority in that courtroom gave its verdict in just over an hour. If right and wrong are decided by law or by vote, then what those men did to Emmett Till was not wrong. And you know that's false.

Maybe the problem was the time and place, and we've evolved. But think about what that means. If society defines morality, then society can't be wrong, and so nothing was ever really wrong. It was only unpopular later.

Perhaps the clearest test of this came about ten years before Emmett Till, at the Nuremberg Trials. The defendants argued, in part, that they had followed the laws of their own country and the orders of their own government. Their leader had even boasted that the Nazis stood on the ground of legality.

The prosecutors answered that some acts are crimes no matter what a nation's laws say. In his opening statement, Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson said the Nazi leaders treated international law, natural law, German law, any law at all, as a propaganda device to be used when it helped and ignored when it didn't. The prosecution appealed to a standard above Germany. C.S. Lewis made the same point. Without a real standard behind human rules, he argued, you have no reason to say one morality is better than another, whether it's civilised versus savage, or Christian versus Nazi.

Here's what I learned.

So here's where this takes us. I see only two honest options.

Option one: there is a moral standard above all of us, one that no person or government can rewrite. This option means Emmett Till's killers were guilty, whatever the jury said, and the wrong was real.

Option two: there is no such standard. This option means morality is just opinion. Your opinion, mine, a jury's, a dictator's. We each decide what's right in our own eyes, and there's no way to say anyone else is wrong. Think of a ball game where there's no rulebook and no referee, and every team keeps its own scoreboard. Nobody could ever win, because everybody wins. Nobody could ever cheat, because there's nothing to cheat. There would be no such thing as foul play, and honestly, that sounds like the foulest idea of all.

To be clear, I’m not claiming that atheists, agnostics, or anyone else can't be moral. Many of the kindest, most honest people I know don't share my faith. The question is not whether people can know right from wrong or live it well. The question is what grounds it. What makes right actually binding on me, whether I feel like it or not?

I know a young man, a friend of my son's, who has thought about this more honestly than most. He told us flatly that there is no God, and therefore no moral standard. Whatever anyone thinks is right is just as good as what anyone else thinks. Hearing him say that pains me, because I care about him. But I respect him deeply, because he followed his reasoning all the way to the end instead of stopping halfway. I think that's the honest position for someone who doesn't believe in God. It's also a position hardly anyone can live in. Say or do something truly unjust to that friend, and I'd bet you'd hear him object. And so would I.

Naturally, this leads to many trying to find a middle path. One of those middle paths says morality is real, like math, but needs no God. That argument names the fact without explaining why it holds authority over me or why anyone owes anything to anyone. The second path says morality is a survival instinct that helped our ancestors. That may explain why we feel outrage, but it doesn't make the outrage correct. A feeling that evolved can't tell you whether the thing you feel is true. And a third path people sometimes take is whether something is good because God says so, or God says so because it's good. The classic answer is that God's own character is the standard, so it's neither.

Voddie Baucham, who passed away in 2025, made this challenge in a sharp but simple way. As I understand his argument, those who deny God still use words like honor, honesty, justice, good, and truth. But if no objective standard exists, they can't account for those words. The question he put to people was not "Are you moral?" It was, "What is the standard for those words grounded upon?"

So, back to Emmett. His killers were acquitted, paid, and never answered for their actions on this earth. But the verdict didn't erase the wrong. Something higher than a courtroom still judged them. Something created a sense of justice in each of us, and we yearn deeply for it in times like the Emmett Till case.

I'm not asking you to believe everything about God today. I'm asking you to take your own sense of justice seriously, as evidence rather than an accident. Notice when you say "that's not fair" this week, at work, in traffic, in the news. Ask yourself, "By what standard?" Then ask whether a standard like that could exist if nothing and no one stood behind it. And if you've never read Mere Christianity, start with part one of the book. It's short, it's clear, and it asks these questions better than I can.

Every time you cry out for justice, you are appealing to a Judge you have never met, and the fact that you keep appealing may be the best evidence that He is there.

I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.

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