Crime and Punishment

Capital punishment has always been for me a subject of intense interest. Fifteen years ago, a close friend of mine ended up on Death Row in Florida (For an account of this see “Deceitful Above All Things” on my blog, Declarations, Explanations, Execrations) for murdering his ex-girlfriend.  She was not the first woman he had killed.

The reading of a newspaper article some years ago, however, had a profound and permanent influence on my feeling and thinking about this topic.  It was a short piece about two young men who had been apprehended after slaying a ten year old girl.  They had kidnapped her, raped her and then stuffed her panties down her throat thus chocking her to death.

After experiencing what I think would be the intense levels of revulsion and anger of most normal people at contemplating such a staggering piece of sadism, I began to think about what should be done with these men, what likely would be done with them and the vast disparity between the two scenarios.

I attempted a thought experiment and tried to imagine what might have followed a crime like this 100 or 150 years ago in an age of simpler jurisprudence.   Upon apprehension it seems likely that these two men would have been brought before a judge, given a quick trial, within days, and then hanged. No psychologists to consider their psychological limitations and produce relevant psychometrics, no psychiatrists to opine on their sanity and no social workers to lament their miserable family histories.  No one then would be much interested in learning about how bad their childhoods were.  Many people have rough childhoods.

Also, in this earlier time there would be few if any delays and no protracted system of appeals. The hideous crime and the harsh penalty would have occurred in very close succession creating a strong association of moral causality between the particularly brutal murder and the severe and swift punishment.

The child’s family would never forget or fully recover from the event, but, and this is a very big “but,”… they would not have to think about or occupy themselves with the future of the monsters who had done this to their daughter.  That part was quickly taken care of and done in a way that clearly, and some might say, appropriately, symbolized both the revulsion of the community with the crime and the importance of the victims and their terrible, unrelenting suffering.

Now the future for the two murders and the family of the victim would be quite different.  From beginning to end everything would be more civilized, more humane. Or would it?  Months, possibly years would pass before the trial took place. Between the conclusion of the trial and the sentencing, weeks, more likely months, would pass.  The sentence would be followed by a long, protracted review with appeal after appeal unfolding and lasting years, decades.  The process would crawl haltingly along and the victim’s family would follow the deliberations and decisions, relive the horror and feel the pain, over and over again.  The murder for them would remain for many years constantly in the present tense. Knowing that the men who inflicted this senseless horror on their daughter are alive, and, that their fate is still uncertain would arouse the worst sort of anger and confusion: how, remembering what they had done to an innocent, defenseless child, could these men be so wrapped in so many procedural and forensic layers of consideration and protection?

Also it is highly probably that the child torturers would have little or no money and so the state would bear the costs for the attorneys to represent them, a cost that would persist for many years as they make their way through the system of appeals.  Also the tax payers would bear the expenses for all of the psychiatric evaluations and examinations.   In fact, prior to the murder these two men would have never had so much attention paid to them and so many resources expended on their behalf. When, if ever, they finally faced an executioner, outside the prison there would be a vigil conducted by people protesting the execution and lamenting the death of the child slayers.

Is this modern way a better one to deal with people who do unspeakably horrible things to other people?  I have an observation which I believe points to a deeply disturbing pathology in our criminal justice system.

Consider the torture the families of the victims undergo as they wait endlessly and helplessly for the criminal justice “system” to hold the murderers of their love ones to account.  The state of Ohio just recently (November 2011) executed a man who had shot his three sons to death while they were sleeping in 1982.  So it takes three decades to execute a man who kills his sons.  What kind of a system puts the loved ones of a victim of a crime like this through decades of misery and anguish?  It is in my opinion a barbaric and cruel one, created and maintained by those who can no longer comprehend an act of depravity and evil and can no longer make a moral separation between real victims and those who made them into victims.     

Criminals have increasingly come to be viewed as ill rather than bad and as such fall under the care and supervision of mental health professionals. You do not punish sick people, you diagnose the illnesses. Diagnosis and punishment are in any practical setting incompatible activities.  You feel sympathy for people who are ill and excuse or at least consider their limitations; you punish people who are bad.  And when they are really bad, as those two mentioned above, you punish them severely not because you love to punish but to show the world how seriously you view the suffering of their victims.  But you cannot do both. Our system tries to do both and that is why it takes twenty or thirty years to execute an unrepentant mass murderer.