Misreading The Text

Martin & Rose (2007: 87-8):

And the contrast between innocence and guilt underlies his second Argument:

It is also not true that the granting of amnesty encourages impunity in the sense that perpetrators can escape completely the consequences of their actions, because amnesty is only given to those who plead guilty, who accept responsibility for what they have done. Amnesty is not given to innocent people or to those who claim to be innocent. It was on precisely this point that amnesty was refused to the police officers who applied for it for their part in the death of Steve Biko. They denied that they had committed a crime, claiming that they had assaulted him only in retaliation for his inexplicable conduct in attacking them. 

Here there is a double contrast implied, between the innocent and the guilty, and between those who confess their guilt and those who falsely claim innocence, thus compounding their crimes.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the argument is made through the grammar, not merely by the antonymic relation between the lexical items guilty and innocent, which is textual (cohesive) in function, not experiential.

[2] To be clear, the primary contrast here is between those who admit guilt and everyone else.  That is, the discourse analysts Martin & Rose have missed the main point of Tutu's argument: that amnesty is not primarily concerned with the contrast guilt vs innocence; it is given to those who admit their guilt, thereby taking responsibility for their actions.