Funny you should say that
Published by violet May 12th, 2008 in Punkass!, Governmental Failures, Human RightsI’ve been working on some pieces about the American criminal justice system, and I came across this:
“A person who has chosen to commit armed robbery, rape or kidnapping has chosen to do something with a strong possibility of causing the death of an innocent person,” Mr. Scheidegger said. “That choice makes it morally justified to convict the person of murder when that possibility happens.”— Serving Life for Providing Car to Killers, Adam Liptak
The article is part of an interesting series in the NYT, American Exception, which deals with the often pathological ways American criminal justice differs from criminal justice systems in the rest of the world.
(A particularly jarring example: the rest of the world has abandoned life sentences without parole for juveniles. When the United Nations adopted a resolution calling for the abolution of the practice, the U.S. was the only dissenting nation.)
But let’s go back to the quote. Kent Scheidegger is a victims’ rights advocate. Perhaps I should rephrase—he’s an advocate for somehow helping the people designated as victims by the criminal justice system by throwing people behind bars, or in the chair. More people, in fact, than we currently are.
Here’s what he wrote in his 2006 testimony before the New Jersey Death Penalty Study Comission:
The primary question before this commission and the Legislature and people of New Jersey is whether you are going to value the lives of the innocent above the lives of the guilty and do what it takes to actually have an effective death penalty in this state. Several measures suggest themselves.
First, get rid of proportionality review. It is not constitutionally required,4 and it is not needed as a practical matter.…
Second, enact some strong limits on collateral review. Every capital defendant should be entitled to a direct appeal and one post-conviction proceeding, and there should be no further reviews of any issue that does not raise a substantial doubt of the identity of the perpetrator.…— Statement of Kent Scheidegger, page 2
And just because sometimes the point needs to be hit with a two-by-four, here’s part of the judge Arthur Cooperman’s statement on the Sean Bell case:
Also, carelessness and incompetence are not standards to be applied here, unless the conduct rises to the level of criminal acts, as defined by the law relating to each count charged.
In short: we can hold individuals responsible for their actions. We can also hold individuals responsible for the forseeable consequences of their actions. In fact, we can hold individuals responsible for potential consequences that we think they should have forseen but didn’t.
However, when you’re talking about state actors, please, be reasonable! You can’t expect police officers not to shoot someone fifty times when they feel a bit uneasy about the situation—you just have to trust that they knew what they were doing. And please, don’t lecture us about the dangerous environment set up by targeted policing programmes, nor about the strong likelihood that such programs will lead to someone, say, getting shot. See, when individual actions lead to people getting shot, it’s a chrime. When states or corporations enact policies that are not simply likely to lead to innocent deaths, but in fact practically guaranteed to do so, then it is a regrettable consequence of a necessary moral calculus.
Ugg, this post makes me want to dig up my research on the International Convention of the Rights of Children and post on it. Curse you for interferring with my laziness!
I’m a little confused by this post. It seems like this:
“Also, carelessness and incompetence are not standards to be applied here, unless the conduct rises to the level of criminal acts, as defined by the law relating to each count charged”
means that police could be charged under a reckless homicide statute should they merit it. Surely that’s a sufficient level of liability?
That said: I don’t have a huge problem with the concept of felony murder. I tend to think that one commits a violent felony at one’s own peril. But Holle didn’t commit a violent felony. He lent his car to a bunch of idiots. His actions might have been a necessary cause for the death to occur, but they sure as fuck shouldn’t be a legal cause under any sane statute.
I dunno. I can’t help but think that I could lend my car to any of my friends and never have the faintest concern that they would use the car to get to a place where they would proceed to murder people. I understand the lack of logical justice, but I also have a hard time crying my eyes out for this guy, who I have an impossible time believing didn’t know what kind of people his friends were and who clearly didn’t care what they were going to do with his car.
In this state, in the 80’s, a 16 year old girl was incercerated for life on a premeditated murder charge because as the judge put it “she set the train in motion” by carrying her boyfriend’s gun in her purse, taking it out and handing it to him, in the course of an armed robbery which ended up with a dead victim.
The argument here, taken to conclusion would be similar to the Florida law that if you feel threatened you are justified in killing a person.
In this iteration people would be convicted on the basis of what they should have known could happened, rather than what did happen.
I think it’s reasonable to expect that if you hand your boyfriend a loaded gun during an armed robbery, he might use it to kill someone…what could she reasonably have expected he intended to do otherwise with a loaded gun during an armed robbery? I must be missing something…
And so, clearly, she’s guilty of premeditated murder?
(I mean, haven’t you heard? Most guns never have to be fired. They’re deterrents! I mean, what would someone getting robbed do with a loaded gun during an armed robbery? Obviously, flail it around until the robber said, “clearly, your phallus is bigger than mine,” and left.)
I support the creation of a restorative justice system that is more concerned with effect than intent, that is more concerned with making people and communities whole and keeping them that way than it is with stabbing the bad people. I think starting by saying that individuals must be criminally responsible for all fallout of their actions is about the worst way to go about creating such a system.
Yes you are missing something.
She reasonably expected the victim would hand over the money. She reasonably expected that if they were caught she would go to juvie for five years for being an accessory to armed robbery.
The shooter in this case got 25 to life.
What you are missing is the selective application of what passes for justice in the courts.
Should it ever come to pass that you make a misjudgement regarding the trustworthiness of a friend and find yourself caught up in a criminal proceeding attempting to defend what seemed at the time to be a perfectly reasonable action you will see what you are missing. It’s called reality.
Wowza! I plan to go on firmly missing reality as long as possible then, and while I’m at it, missing as frequently as possible anybody who thinks it’s just a “misjudgement” to hand a loaded weapon to someone for the express purpose of having that someone threaten a third party who’s never hurt either of them in their lives in exchange for money.
Lisa, my point at least isn’t that she shouldn’t have to look at her role in the murder, or that we collectively shouldn’t look at how people and institutions contribute to any individual act of violence. Rather the opposite, in fact.
But I think if we’re going to do that, we should do that, and actually provide a means for that process to be helpful to someone. As it stands, the criminal justice system says, “Okay, lock them all up, then, for they are clearly Bad,” as if that solves anything. And, at the same time, we fight tooth and claw against any notion that institutions and people acting on their behalf should be held responsible for the inevitable—or at least highly foreseeable—consequences of their policies and decisions. Because to do otherwise would be to undermine the authority of those institutions, which obviously must be unassailable.
I am absolutely all about holding said institutions and the people acting on their behalf to the same standards that everyone else is held to–higher standards, in fact, as their power over others is also greater. And I do believe in the ability to tell different degrees of “badness” from each other and to respond to them accordingly–though in the specific case of the girl, I really see not a lot of difference between handing her boyfriend the loaded gun during an armed robbery in progress and pulling the trigger herself. But then, what do we do about people who willingly take the life of other people for money they don’t need? If we can’t change their minds about that being wrong? Options at that point start to look very limited.
Lisa,
I was refering to your earlier claim: ” I can’t help but think that I could lend my car to any of my friends and never have the faintest concern that they would use the car to get to a place where they would proceed to murder people. ”
Not the misjudgement of a 16 year old girl, who obviously trusted her boyfriend when she should not have.
“And I do believe in the ability to tell different degrees of “badness” from each other and to respond to them accordingly–though in the specific case of the girl, I really see not a lot of difference between handing her boyfriend the loaded gun during an armed robbery in progress and pulling the trigger herself.”
What you are claiming here makes no sense. Threatening a person with a gun is not the same thing as shooting a person with a gun. Handing a person a gun is not the same thing as shooting a gun.
You go on to say that, “what do we do about people who willingly take the life of other people for money they don’t need?”
At this point I don’t know what to say to you. When you are a kid living on the street you do indeed need money. While I understand that there have been cases where young men robbed and killed people for thrills, it is much rarer than you seem to think. Reality, as I mentioned before, is not like the movies, the teevee, or the stories you read in the newspapers.
We cannot control the actions of other people, nor is our judgement infallible.
Thousands of women are incarcerated all over this country for failing to prevent their husband or boyfriend from committing a crime. That is reality.