THE SCENE
A verdict that arrived owing a debt no court could settle
The verdict came five years after the killing. What William Davis did with it took longer still to explain.
In March 2018, Davis’s son, Demarco Pegues, was shot and killed in a Charlotte shopping center parking lot. It took until June 2023 for a jury to convict Jeffrey Boggs of first-degree murder, and for a judge to hand down a sentence of life without parole (WSOCTV, 2023).
That much was procedure — the slow machinery courts exist to run, arriving at an answer the law is built to produce.
What Davis said next was not procedure.
He told the courtroom he forgave the man who killed his son. He said his faith had carried him there. He asked whether he might be allowed to hug Boggs — the man his son shared a birthday with, March the first, what Davis once called “the greatest birthday gift a man could ever have.”
He did not pretend the loss was contained to his own family. “Two families and two people are hurting,” he told a local reporter afterward — a sentence that refuses to shrink the tragedy down to a size where only his own grief counts.
Nothing in the transcript required any of this. Victims are not obligated to forgive. Grief carries no legal duty to resolve into grace. Davis said it anyway, in the same breath he described his son’s death, to the man who caused it, with no evidence it would move the sentence by a single day.
THE OTHER HAND
A hand that would not move, in a church basement in Munich
This is not a new problem for people whose faith outlasts their court date.
In 1947, a Dutch woman named Corrie ten Boom stood at the end of a talk she’d given in a Munich church, describing what her family endured after they were caught hiding Jewish refugees in their home during the war. Her sister Betsie had died in the camp where they were both eventually sent. As ten Boom recounted years later, a man approached her afterward with his hand extended — a former guard from that same camp, asking, plainly, to be forgiven.
She did not describe forgiving him easily. By her own account, the memory of the camp and of her sister’s death rose up in that instant with a force she hadn’t expected, and for a long moment she could not make her arm move. The theology had come easily minutes earlier, from the pulpit. The hand did not.
What eventually let her extend it, she wrote, wasn’t a feeling arriving to make the gesture possible. It was closer to a decision made before the feeling showed up — an act performed, as she put it, on nothing more than obedience, with the emotion catching up only after.
Ten Boom’s hand and Davis’s arms are separated by eighty years, an ocean, and every difference of circumstance a historian could list. But the motion underneath is the same one: a person with every justification to withhold something instead extends it, in public, to the person least positioned to ask for it.
Forgiveness did not make either woman’s or man’s memory less true. It made the person who caused the memory less sovereign over what happened inside it next.
THE TEXT
What the courtroom could sentence, and what it couldn’t
It is worth being precise here, because the word “forgiveness” gets asked to do work it was never meant to do alone.
Forgiveness, justice, and reconciliation are three separate transactions, and collapsing them into one is where the concept most often gets misused. Forgiveness is a choice made inside the person who was wronged. Justice is what a society imposes on the person who did the wronging. Reconciliation is a restored relationship between the two — and it is the only one of the three that requires the other person’s participation at all. Davis’s forgiveness of Boggs is not a claim that the crime should be minimized, and it is not an offer of reconciliation. Boggs remains guilty. He remains sentenced. Nothing about Davis’s forgiveness asks anyone to revise either fact.
Peter once asked Jesus how many times he was obligated to forgive someone, proposing seven as a generous ceiling.
Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.
(Matthew 18:22, KJV)
The number was never meant to be counted to — it exists to break counting as a strategy. The parable Jesus tells immediately afterward, of a servant forgiven an enormous debt who then refuses to forgive a small one owed to him, makes the point sharper still: withheld forgiveness isn’t neutral. It’s a debt of its own, quietly compounding.
A different sentence, spoken from the position of the one being killed rather than the one deciding the sentence, appears at the crucifixion:
Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.
(Luke 23:34, KJV)
Forgiveness offered from the position of the wronged, not the position of the untouched, is the only kind the text seems interested in.
And Paul, writing to a church with every reason to want their persecutors punished, doesn’t tell them the injustice wasn’t real. He tells them where to set it down:
Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
(Romans 12:19, KJV)
The operative phrase is not forgive and forget. It’s vengeance is mine — a transfer of ownership, not a demand for amnesia. Davis didn’t say the killing should go unaddressed. He said he was no longer willing to be the one holding it.
Scripture doesn’t file a private tragedy like this one under some hidden verdict from heaven — nothing here suggests Demarco’s death was a coded judgment on anyone. What the text keeps insisting on instead is smaller and harder to escape: whatever a person finally decides to keep carrying, or decides to set down, tends to become visible to the people standing closest to him.
None of this promises Davis’s grief will end on any predictable schedule, or end at all. What it records is that forgiveness and the disappearance of pain are two different processes, running on two different clocks — and the first doesn’t wait for the second to finish before it starts.
THE PATTERN
What the evidence can say, and where it goes quiet
Not everyone in Davis’s position reaches this — and that refusal deserves to be taken seriously rather than treated as a moral failure waiting to be corrected. If anything, how rarely people reach it is what makes Davis’s choice worth examining rather than expecting.
Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor, once described being brought as a prisoner to the bedside of a dying SS soldier who asked him, by the uniform alone, for forgiveness for atrocities committed against Jews — not even atrocities against Wiesenthal specifically. Wiesenthal sat with him, listened, and left the room in silence, forgiving nothing. He spent the rest of his life unsure whether that silence was the right answer, and closed his account of it by asking his readers what they would have done. He never supplied his own answer as a verdict for anyone else’s case. His hesitation is not the opposite of what Davis did; it’s a reminder that what Davis did was never owed, expected, or guaranteed — closer to an exception than a duty.
A 2020 outcome-wide analysis followed more than 54,000 American women in the Nurses’ Health Study II over several years, comparing those who reported forgiving others frequently to those who rarely did (Long et al., 2020). The researchers cannot tell us what happens next in William Davis’s life specifically — this was a population study, not a prediction engine for one man. What they found, across that population, was a consistent association between frequent forgiveness and better subsequent psychosocial and mental-health outcomes: less depression, greater life satisfaction, stronger reported social support.
The same analysis found something it couldn’t pin down nearly as well: the connection between forgiveness and physical health outcomes was weak, and mostly didn’t hold up once the researchers corrected for testing so many variables at once. Forgiving didn’t show up reliably in blood pressure, disease rates, or other bodily measures the way it showed up in mood and relationships.
That gap is worth sitting inside rather than explaining away. **Forgiveness isn’t a cure for the body — it looks, in the data, more like a decision that eases the weight the mind is asked to carry, not a treatment for the wound itself.**
What the data may be picking up isn’t relief from the fact of a loss — it’s a changed relationship to carrying it. Forgiveness doesn’t obviously close the wound. It may change who gets to keep speaking through it.
THE RETURN
The door he still can’t face
In the previous installment, we examined a substitute teacher grieving his own mother, given an exact and particular gift by students who had known him only three months — [내부링크 자리, 클러스터 URL 확정 시 삽입]. The question underneath that story was what people owe one another when nothing requires them to notice anyone at all.
Davis answers a harder version of the same question. Not what we owe a stranger who is grieving — what we owe the one person on earth we would be forgiven, by any court and any conscience, for hating for the rest of our lives.
He asked to put his arms around that man in a courtroom. He still, by his own account, cannot look directly at his own front door — some part of him still braced for his son to walk through it. Both things are true about the same father, in the same season, and neither cancels the other out.
Boggs remains guilty. Demarco remains gone. The sentence, once handed down, cannot be renegotiated by anyone in that courtroom, including Davis.
What was never under the court’s authority to grant, sentence, or withhold was who Boggs would go on occupying inside William Davis — whether Davis’s remaining years would be spent also prosecuting a case the court had already closed. That is the only ruling Davis made that day. He is the only one who could have made it, and no one, including the judge who sentenced Boggs to life, could have sentenced him to make it too.
Notes
1. Long, K. N. G., Worthington, E. L., Jr., VanderWeele, T. J., & Chen, Y. (2020). Forgiveness of others and subsequent health and well-being in mid-life: A longitudinal study on female nurses. BMC Psychology, 8(1), 104. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-020-00470-w
Sources: WSOC-TV (2023, June 29). “Father says he forgives son’s killer after he was sentenced to life in prison”; ten Boom, C., Sherrill, J., & Sherrill, E. (1971). The Hiding Place. Chosen Books; Wiesenthal, S. (1997). The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. Schocken Books.