A God for the Accused

A God for the Accused names the theological shift Austin makes through her cousin Dalin’s imprisonment and death: she comes to understand that God is present with people who are accused, incarcerated, and called criminals, not only with those whose lives meet a test of innocence. That conviction widens her understanding of racial justice beyond the church and rejects the idea that a Black person must be perfect to deserve mercy or the right to live.

From the Black Church to a Wider Theology

Austin’s understanding grows from a faith formed in the Black church. As a child, she encountered a Jesus Christ who cared for poor and sick people, for those in pain, and for people facing broken relationships or the cruelty of supervisors. The church’s preaching treated such struggles as real, while insisting that heartbreak and hardship did not have to be the end of a person’s story. This was not an abstract theology: care for people unable to pay utility bills or find transportation belonged alongside concern for their souls.

Austin later learned the name James Cone and read about Black liberation theology, but she understood that the liberating power of Black Jesus was already familiar from her childhood church. The sermons she had known made faith embodied and contextual, unlike the chapel services of her school. That foundation helps explain why Dalin’s life could not remain, for her, a question of criminal law alone. His treatment demanded a theological response to the Black lives that her own relatively privileged experience had not required her to confront.

Dalin and the Criminal Justice System

Dalin pursued a rap career and sold drugs to pay for studio time. His circumstances unfolded amid policies that intensified punishment for drug offenses: President Clinton signed an act calling for mandatory minimums for multiple drug offenses, while police departments cracked down on nonviolent crime. As a young Black man, Dalin was repeatedly stopped by police, strip-searched in the street, assaulted by officers who humiliated him, and arrested many times. His family sometimes heard that he was back behind bars when Austin returned home for the holidays.

When Dalin was home, he was a devoted father who delighted in his young daughter’s spirited behavior. Austin remembers the family bowing their heads and thanking God to have one another. That tenderness stands beside the news that Dalin had received his third strike and would be imprisoned for ten years for a nonviolent offense. For Austin, the length of that sentence was concrete: it amounted to her high-school and college years, plus two more years of adulthood.

Years later, while working full-time and studying social justice in a master’s program in Michigan, Austin read Jimmy Santiago Baca’s memoir A Place to Stand. Its account of prison violence, solitary confinement, and the pressure to defend oneself made her wonder what Dalin was experiencing. She did not know whether he faced violence from other incarcerated people or staff, whether his mail was withheld, or what rules he had to learn to survive. Those were questions, not facts she could claim to know. But the book made the distance between them harder to accept. Austin decided to write to Dalin rather than wait for his release or rely on the hope that life might eventually bring them together.

Grief, Anger, and the Accused

Dalin replied with mercy and love, and Austin was eager to know him. She began another letter, unsure whether he would receive it. He died in prison only weeks later. After hours of tearful calls, prison officials told the family that Dalin and other men in an honor program had been caught outdoors when a storm broke. The general population had received a warning, but the men in the honor program had not. As heavy rain came, they tried to return inside; lightning struck, and Dalin was killed.

At his wake, Austin held her Bible with Dalin’s letter tucked inside. His handwriting became a reminder of him as funny, merciful, hopeful, connected to his family history, and wanting to come home. A week later, a recently released man came forward at church to recommit himself to God, and his ten-year-old daughter ran into his arms. The congregation celebrated their reunion. Austin found it beautiful and, at the same time, was furious: Dalin’s daughter had just been told that her father was dead and would never come home. The contrast made the unequal distribution of second chances impossible to keep at a distance.

Austin’s anger at God did not frighten her. She understood the Bible as a place where people bring anger to God, and she let her grief speak before turning to harder questions about the state’s responsibility to incarcerated people, Dalin’s encounters with police, and mandatory minimums. His death also made her ask what her theology said about Black lives unlike her own. She had to reject the notion that Dalin’s life was worth less because he failed a standard of Christian innocence or perfection.

The Meaning of A God for the Accused

Austin anticipates that some readers will blame Dalin’s death on his drug dealing or criminal record, or use dehumanizing labels to make his death seem deserved. In that judgment, she sees a racial double standard: white people who commit serious crimes can still be regarded as people who did something wrong, while Black people are often made to earn recognition as fully human. The demand for Black perfection becomes a condition for receiving compassion, grace, or justice. Austin refuses that condition.

Her answer is not that Dalin’s death can be undone; it cannot. Rather, she finds significance in the claim that Jesus Christ knew what it meant to be accused and incarcerated, and died with a stated crime above his crown of thorns. God’s presence with the accused therefore makes people whom society condemns visible within Christian faith. It does not erase the harms of imprisonment or bring Dalin home, but it changes who belongs within the reach of theological care.

This understanding also connects with Austin’s earlier image of Jesus Christ’s anger in the Temple. There, Jesus Christ confronts corrupt officials, overturns furniture, frees animals, and makes space for poor people, wounded people, and children. Austin imagines that those without power would recognize the anger’s liberating purpose, even if others called it destructive. Across these reflections, anger is not the opposite of faith: it can expose injustice and defend the possibility of belonging.

Dalin’s death consequently expands Austin’s account of racial justice and reconciliation. The subject is no longer limited to relations between Black and white church members or to injustices within church life; it becomes a framework for understanding God’s work in the world. A God for the Accused insists that the person society condemns remains worthy of recognition and care. For Austin, that conviction is inseparable from telling the truth about the systems that punish Black communities and from refusing to measure a Black life by a standard of flawless innocence.