Category: Justice

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Remorse

“It was weird that I didn’t feel remorse,” NY Times, 2014-06-08, from a story about two 12-year-old girls, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, who lured a third girl into a woods and stabbed her19 times.

I’ve heard this before and I always wonder why, if you didn’t feel remorse, you would think it was “weird” that you didn’t feel remorse. There’s a whole world of morality and philosophy and culture hiding in that little phrase. Does anybody really feel remorse or does anybody else just not think it’s weird?

Of course, we all act as if remorse is what you feel after you do something wrong. We act as if everyone knows what is wrong and what is right, and we respond to regrettable events appropriately, the way everyone would.

The girl who made the statement above believed it. Well, she says something like that. If you take everything people say at face value, you would have to say that she meant it– she thought she would feel remorse. She was prepared for it, but still committed to the task at hand– proving to “Slender Man” that she was evil enough to earn his trust.

She could have said to her victim, it’s nothing personal.

It is quite possible that most people don’t feel remorse. We all pay lip service to values like kindness and compassion but, as when we charge adolescents as adults in order to maximize the amount of suffering we can inflict upon them, we don’t seem so different.

The judge will sentence these girls to long, long terms in federal penitentiaries. And then she might just say to herself, “it was weird that I didn’t feel remorse”.

Oh but wait– the judge is an adult. She will have learned long ago to say– regardless of what she really feels– how sorry she is to have to punish these girls like this.

 

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The Appropriate Sentence for a Crime

Almost everybody loves to whine about criminals getting off easy. That’s all he got? Four years? Five years? Twenty years? It’s not enough. They should lock him up for life. No wonder there’s so much crime!

I don’t know of any divine tablet or sacred spreadsheet that tells us what a “light” sentence is or what is a sufficient punishment for, say, a burglary, or an assault, or a rape. People routinely act as if they know but they usually only say it should be more than what it was. Always more. If you asked someone out of the blue how many years in prison a man should serve for, say, rape, I doubt that most people have a clue as to how to arrive at a particular number.

How long should a man serve for conning people out of money? 144 years?

The most useful measure, in my opinion, is the relative seriousness of a crime. And the “seriousness” of a crime should be measured in harm.  And what is a harm?  If you have deprived someone of a material good, or health, life, or limb. There, we are on firmer ground, though not in the clear.

What types of crime are there?

There should never be any punishment for thought crimes. You would think that would be obvious– I would have thought it would be obvious– but in the so-called war on terror, the U.S. is now locking up young men for talking about jihad even if they cannot be shown to have taken a single actual step towards committing an act of terrorism. Talking about a crime is not really a crime unless you proceed to commit the crime. Talking about using drugs without using drugs is not illegal. Talking about having sex without having sex is not illegal. But talking about jihad without doing any jihad will get you 20 years, especially if an enthusiastic FBI informant offers to supply you with guns and bombs.

There are “victimless” crimes like possession of drugs for personal use, prostitution, possession of pornography (which, under the Canadian criminal code, used to include depictions of homosexual acts). When people try to justify prosecution for these crimes they frequently give, as reasons, consequences that are already illegal under other laws: driving while drunk, assault, exploitation of minors. But if a man (or a woman) uses threats of physical violence to force another person into acts of prostitution, I believe he or she should be prosecuted for a) exploitation (taking the money earned by someone else’s forced labour) or b) assault. But if two independent adults agree to have sex with each other in exchange for money, the government should stay out of it.

Drugs are more complicated: prescription drugs should be regulated to ensure quality and accuracy of dosages.   Alcohol should be regulated to prevent minors from having access but what if someone brews their own?  I think it is possible to prohibit giving alcohol to minors but if a person wants to consume home-brewed liquors in his own home, the government should stay out of it.  And the government has no business telling anyone they can’t grow a particular plant and then stick its leaves in their mouths and set them on fire. As long as they don’t get behind the wheel of a car after doing so.

But then, why should the tobacco industry be regulated?  You see– it does get complicated.  There is a difference: the shareholders and managers of tobacco companies profit by deceiving customers into believing their product is harmless (and, at one time, glamorous).  That invites legitimate government regulation.  Could we have a world where commercial sales of tobacco is banned entirely but if someone wants to grow some in his backyard and smoke it that is entirely up to the individual?

Should motorcycle owners be required to wear helmets?  And if they don’t, would society be okay with denying medical care to a motorcyclist who chose not to wear a helmet and got into an accident that caused a head injury?  Ayn Rand might say, sure.  Our society would find that hard to stomach.  In the end, the most rational choice may be to require helmets.

There are property crimes. I think there should be a big difference between the punishment for property crimes and the punishment for crimes of violence. And I think the punishment for property crimes should be focused on restitution, not on revenge.

Crimes of violence should be taken very seriously, and repeat offenders should receive escalating sentences. This is one area where I have some sympathy for victims’ rights organizations– with limitations. Quite often, we hear mythical tales of someone who committed numerous violent acts and kept getting released after light sentences. In many instances, the story is more complicated than that: our judges are not stupid.

Capital Punishment is absurd: if we really believe that life is sacred and the taking of a life is a horrible offense, the last message we want to send to society is that we will do it too. Besides, as DNA testing has shown, we are all too frequently wrong in determining who committed the crime and a capital sentence cannot be reversed.

Unfortunately, what has happened in the U.S. is a ratcheting up of criminal sentencing. And the word “ratcheting” is exactly what I mean. A ratchet, if you don’t know, is a box wrench on a handle that can be switched to allow the user to quickly turn the handle back and forth while applying force in one direction only. In the U.S., over the last forty years, there has been constant political pressure to lengthen sentences without the slightest movement backwards. It has become politically impossible–thanks to the “tough on crime” wing of the Republican party– to advocate for lighter sentences for anything (though there are signs the U.S. is coming to their senses on the issue). As a result, sentences for some crimes in the U.S. have moved beyond severe to ridiculous and then to the sadistic and finally absurd. Yes, there are people in federal prisons in the U.S. serving 20-25 years for possession of marijuana. If you’re a rational person, you probably don’t believe me.

The benchmark sentence for violent crime should be 25 years for murder and there should be a chance of parole after 15 years. Hey, I can be specific. And you can quibble all you like about the exact number, but I believe that 25 is a rational, reasonable guess as to how much is appropriate and constructive. I believe that even a murderer should have some hope of being released some day if only to provide him with an incentive to change his life while in prison. Prison guards will tell you that it is not helpful for a prisoner to know that he will never be released no matter what his behavior is like, in prison.  He or she has nothing to lose.

Scale that down to three months for a basic assault that does not include sufficient violence to inflict permanent injury to the victim for a person who is not a repeat offender. It seems rational to me to give suspended sentences to first-time offenders in this category, particularly if they take steps to turn their lives around, especially making personal, public apologies and restitution.

The rest I will leave alone– it would take years of work and analysis and practice to develop a useful, sensible scale of appropriate punishments for violent crimes that fall in between murder and assault. Hey, we have that: it’s called the criminal justice system. It needs to be fixed, within parameters like the ones I suggest above, but it’s possible, because we do still have the miracle of rule by law.

And we must stop adjusting criminal sentences by blandly pleading for “more”.

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Justice vs. The Family Feud

There was a time when justice was simple: if someone wronged you, you wronged him back. If someone murdered your child or your father or your brother, you murdered him, and maybe some of his friends and family if they stood in the way. If someone took your girl, you took his life. If someone took your food, you beat him to a pulp. Brawls. Blood feuds. Civil wars.

The problem was that it often became quite murky as to where the center of gravity was in these sometimes long sequences of actions and responses. We humans are very good at rationalizing away our own culpabilities and investing our own actions with some kind of obscure virtue or wisdom that others may not apprehend. We seek revenge and won’t hesitate to extract more punishment than might be deserved, to satisfy a craving that is not about the health of a community or some kind of “balance” to human affairs: we want to see them suffer. We want to be seen as the wronged victim because nothing makes you seem more righteous or virtuous than being able to point at someone else who is very, very bad. You thereby entitled to do the crime he or she did, to them, or even more, because it is so outrageous that virtuous, innocent you, was wronged by them.

But years of experience taught people that these kind of blood-feuds only led to disaster, to wars, to destruction, to division and acrimony. Can anyone imagine these disputes ever ending with, “oh, all right, I guess now we’re even”? We’re never even: your revenge was always somehow excessive or unjustified or came at the wrong time.

It is one of the greatest miracles of civilization: rule of law. The idea that crimes should be addressed by the community, not by the wronged party, and that the appropriate punishment should be decided by neutral third parties, not by the relatives or friends of the victim. This was progress: the wiser heads in a community saw that allowing individuals to take revenge for crimes committed against them led to instability and factionalism and hatred and ended up destroying everyone. And the wiser heads prevailed, in the West, at least, in the Magna Carta, and democracy and law and the courts and impartial judges.

Where did it come from? Probably from the idea of God, of something greater than ourselves, who alone was entitled to judge and exact punishment. Try as you might to locate the idea in “natural law”, it’s hard to make the leap to transcendence. Especially once you realize that the oft-cited “eye for an eye” is, in fact, the opposite of Christ’s teachings.

But it’s hard to shake those old instincts. And it’s hard for a lot of people to look beyond their own grievances towards what is good for society in the long term. Over and over again, you hear people insist that a particular sentence given by a court is not enough. He got off lightly. We need tougher sentencing. We need to bring back capital punishment: murdering someone is so wrong, we ought to murder him.

And so we have the victims rights movement. I heard two representatives talking on the CBC this morning. They really feel it is just awful that we have this “rule of law” thing (though they would never put it that way) and that the victims of a crime don’t get to pick out the punishment. No, they would never put it that way: instead they insist that our criminal justice system doesn’t pay enough attention to the victims of crime– it’s always only about the offender, and they are right sick of it.

You might be excused for thinking for a moment that people don’t go to jail anymore and that victims rights advocates are doing nothing more than trying to see to it that wrongdoers are punished.

They will never, ever use the word “revenge”, except, to deny that that is what they really want.

They will say that what they want is a role in the criminal prosecution of the perpetrator. In other words, exactly what it is that our civilization decided long ago was a bad idea.

The primary virtue of rule of law is precisely the opposite of what they want: personal justice. Over the centuries, we have invested enormous resources into a system that is impersonal and objective and rational. It could do better at all of these things but whatever it’s faults it tries to take into consideration the long-term interests of the community, and a degree of compassion and reason and interest in rehabilitation are all in the long term interests of the community.

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The Inevitable Next Mass Shooting

It is a fact that there will be many more mass shootings in the U.S. So whenever I see a new one that makes the news, I am tempted to feel rather sanguine about it. There is no element of surprise. They come and go like the rain and the wind even though, unlike the rain and the wind, it is possible to stop them.

Here’s the basic elements of the American equation:

  • guns are easily, readily available almost everywhere in the country
  • the government has not the slightest real curiosity about the purpose, mental condition, or emotional stability of the purchasers of these guns
  • these guns include assault rifles capable of firing off hundreds of rounds very, very quickly
  • a substantial percentage of the population is mentally ill or emotionally unstable or becoming emotionally unstable or about to get fired or dumped by a girlfriend
  • there is no way to detect a person who is about to be emotionally unstable and may choose to mark his first occasion with a few fireworks

Given these elements, mass shootings are not likely: they are inevitable. They are not merely inevitable: they are scheduled. We may not know the exact date and time of any particular mass shootings but we know with a good deal of certainty that they will occur on a regular basis over any fixed period of time and that no one will make any real attempt to prevent them from happening again. In fact, a lot of effort will be made– successfully– to ensure that they happen again.

Here’s another fact:

  • since no one can know when a person will begin shooting, having armed guards at various locations, like schools, will, at best, limit the damage.

And then, here’s the kicker:

  • some people will be killed by accident by some of the armed guards, or as a result of more guns being in circulation due to the the belief that arming as many people as possible will prevent future mass killings
  • the armed guards are very likely to miss their targets very often, thereby killing more bystanders

Even the police, with all their training, can rarely shoot straight in an actual confrontation with a man or men with guns.

In a high-noon scenario, a shoot-out, at the OK corral or wherever, each duelist knows that the other person is about to try to shoot him. Each person has a fair chance of beating the draw and shooting at the other person first. In reality, most of these shots will miss. In a mass shooting, the killer always has first draw.

Are we being brainwashed by TV in which killers always hold last conversations with their victims before shooting? We better hope the killers are brainwashed too– if not, the first shot at an armed guard will be a surprise every single time.

There is no high noon for a mass killer. Since no one really waits for someone to start shooting, and you can’t possibly always wait, the killer will draw his weapon first and stands a pretty good chance of killing a fair number of people before anyone anywhere nearby can respond. So go ahead and vote for that idiot politician who wants to add the cost of an armed police officer or private security guard to every elementary school in the country just so every potential killer doesn’t have to ever undergo a grueling background check before he takes possession of a new gun. Go ahead, and if you are unlucky enough to be a parent of the first child shot at the next school shooting and the security guard did not have ESP and did not manage to anticipate that the kid with the kit bag was a killer with a semi-automatic rifle and shoot him first, go ahead and sue, if you want. The Republicans have passed a law making everyone responsible for providing guns to mentally unstable people– and lots and lots of ammunition– immune to lawsuits.

Yes, Toyota can be sued for an imaginary accelerator problem, but no gun manufacturer or gun store owner can be sued for providing an efficient, deadly weapon to a deranged teenager.

Americans live in a country which has virtually scheduled for itself a mass shooting every few months. It has guaranteed it. You vote for these assholes over and over again– you have nothing to complain about. Spare me your shock and outrage when the next one happens, on schedule, soon. You refuse to do anything about it.

[Update 2019-03-27: a State Supreme Court in Hartford, Connecticut has just reinstated a lawsuit against Remington in spite of the legislation exempting gun-makers from liability.]

 

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Dan Rather’s Big Lie

After 50 years, I remain fascinated by a single incident related to the Kennedy Assassination. And I really believe that you may find it as fascinating as I do no matter what you believe about the Kennedy Assassination. Actually, I don’t think that’s true at all, but I don’t care. You should be fascinated by it– it makes no sense. And it makes all the sense in the world.

It was known almost immediately that someone had shot a film of the assassination. In fact, there were several films, but there was only film that captured the essential event in glorious colour, with sharpness, and reasonable proximity: that is the film, of course, shot by clothing merchant, Abraham Zapruder, who was standing on a kind of pagoda with the assistance of his assistant, Marilyn Sitzman. A reporter chatted with Zapruder after the assassination. If you are into conspiracies– and who can resist– you will note that the reporter offered to put Zapruder in contact with a Secret Service Agent, who, we would have assumed, would have loved to have a beautiful, clear, colourful, cinematic souvenir of them all standing on the follow-up car staring at the assassination event.

The Secret Service accompanied Zapruder to a local television station and then to Eastman Kodak’s local processing plant, and then to another processing plant, the Jamieson Film Company, to have some copies made. The Secret Service had a look at this film. And then Richard Stolley, an editor from Life Magazine, amazingly arrived to negotiate with Zapruder for exclusive rights to the film and all prints from the film, for about $150,000. Richard Stolley worked for a man named C. D. Jackson at Time-Life.

C.D. Jackson was a close friend of the CIA, and helped establish the Bilderberg Group. You couldn’t make this shit up. Yes, this guy who had obtained custody of the most compelling evidence of a conspiracy in the Kennedy Assassination worked with the CIA.

We now know it didn’t work, but, if you were the suspicious sort, what this looks like is the conspirators jumping in to make sure that nobody ever sees the evidence that might disprove that Oswald and Oswald alone killed Kennedy, from the 6th Floor the Texas Book Depository, from behind.

I say it did not work. Or it worked better than in their wildest dreams.

Zapruder had a nightmare about people paying to see his film in Times Square. He didn’t mind the paying part. But I guess his nightmare included people being repelled about the idea of him selling frame 313, in which Kennedy’s head explodes. So a condition of sale was that frame 313 could not be shown. He kept his money.

Life Magazine eventually published very poor quality prints taken from the film, but that was all the American public would see of the film for a long, long, long time.

Understandably, there was considerable curiosity about the film. Once it became clear that a “commission” of sterile old fat white men was going to pin the whole thing on a “lone nut” no matter what the evidence was (I’m not sure why they even bothered to hold hearings or examine anything: they disregarded any evidence that opened any doors), there was even more curiosity. One of the central tenets of the Warren Commission’s findings was that all of the shots came from behind, from Oswald’s “sniper’s nest”. But some witnesses and conspiracy theorists didn’t believe Oswald could have fired all of the shots. Some people in Dealey Plaza thought the shots came from the grassy knoll. There was some discussion even at Parkland Hospital about an “entry” wound in the neck, and about the head snapping backwards, and even about an entry wound in the forehead.

In the midst this hot and heavy discussion rode CBS reporter Dan Rather to the rescue. The public was told that, as little children, as tiny, irresponsible, wee little children, they could not be trusted to view the best evidence of who killed their president, but Dan Rather would assume this burden for us, almost like Jesus going on the cross. And so Dan Rather watched the film very, very carefully– this was by far, the biggest news story of the decade, after all, so he wouldn’t want to miss a detail– and then, instead of staying to try to outbid Life Magazine for the film, he ran as fast as he could back to the local CBS affiliate so he could breathlessly report to the American public that the film, indeed, showed Kennedy’s head going violently forward with the impact of the third shot. “Forward and to the right”.

“forward and to the right”

I am still astonished at this. Kennedy’s head, of course, jerked violently backwards, to the left. It’s the most obvious thing about the third shot: backwards and to the left. As if Kennedy might have been shot from the front.

I leave aside the complicated argument that a shot from the rear could have produced that motion.  It is possible, but complicated.

So, Dan Rather, with a chance to be at the center of the biggest news story of the decade, lies to millions of people. Why?

Was it a mistake? Could it be that Dan Rather, for all his fame and all of his promotion and self-promotion, and self-aggrandizement, and posturing, was a complete idiot who couldn’t tell left from right, up from down, or in from out? Could it be that he could not, fifteen minutes later, remember which direction Kennedy’s head was going in when his skull was blown open by a rifle shot, after viewing the most shocking, important 22 second film clip in history?

Did Dan Rather know that the assassination was to be pinned on a lone gunman shooting from above and behind and that all conspiracies were to be excluded? It seems unlikely: Rather saw the film on the day of the assassination. On the other hand, everyone knew, by then, that the suspect had worked in the Texas Book Depository, and I’m sure Rather’s instincts were that the American public needed to be reassured that there was no conspiracy regardless of whether or not there had actually been one. Oswald was in custody. He knew the outlines of the conspiracy. He certainly could have been aware of which conspiracy would be the preferred conspiracy.

But perhaps Dan was already prepared, emotionally and intellectually, to play his role in American politics and culture over the next forty years, that of a superficially liberal journalist, of slight but discernibly progressive inclinations, but fundamentally establishment in orientation and interests. This is someone who might eventually think that Nixon should be impeached, but only after he has observed that all political parties do dirty tricks. This is someone who would become opposed to the Viet Nam war only after every other credible authority has long before switched sides, and then he would try to make it sound like he was being courageous. Rather would observe that peaceniks are naïve, because, after all, real enemies will really resist all our attempts to take all their oil.

It was this kind of faux liberalism that led the New York Times to endorse the Iraq war at the time the Bush Administration was hustling it.

About the Camera

The Camera: a Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series Model 414 PD

1960 Bell and Howell Camera DUO Power Zoom Zoomatic its the image 1

Dan, do you wish that, fifty years later, people would just leave it alone? Sorry. You don’t deserve that kind of forgetfulness.

About Mrs. Kennedy

There is another surprise. Rather — accurately, for a change– described, in his first recorded account of the film, how Mrs. Kennedy had tried to get out of the car in the middle of the assassination. The next day, the day after the assassination, CBS decided to have Rather broadcast his experience of the film live again (Rather was being groomed after all). But, they told him, leave out the part about Mrs. Kennedy. It was considered indecorous. America, they said (according to Dan) was not “ready” to absorb the image of the first lady trying not to get shot.

In fact, I still believe Mrs. Kennedy was trying to retrieve part of John Kennedy’s skull, which had been blown off and was slipping down the back of the limo. It was later recovered by a bystander and “returned” to the Secret Service (and flown up to Bethesda to be reunited with the body.)

I am astonished, but then not astonished, at how casually the establishment decides for Americans what they should or should not know. Just astonished. The omission of important information about what happened is bad, bad journalism, dishonest and irresponsible. And it is these same people, these same institutions who turn pale and almost feint when the idea of getting your news through the internet is raised…. unmediated!! You must be mad!

My Theories on Conspiracies

The Magic Bullet

 

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Hysterical Frigid Puritans

Todd Hoffner was a very successful football coach at Minnesota State Mankato. They gave him a cell phone, a Blackberry.

One day, his children, girls aged 4 and 9, and boy 8, came downstairs in towels fresh from a bubble bath (which they had taken together), and demanded he record their performance with his video camera. The towels came off and they danced and played as young children do.

There are actually people in this world who think that children this age running around naked, dancing, and playing, is deviant in some way. I can’t tell you just how sick I think these people are. But I think these people gravitate towards positions of authority: they really think they need to run other peoples’ lives, make decisions for them, and ruin them, if necessary, to further their own egocentric power lusts.

When Todd Hoffner’s cell phone broke, he took it in to the IT Department at Mankato and asked them to recover any photos and videos from it before replacing it. This they did. When some anonymous tiny little smidgeon of an IT technician saw the video, he freaked and called the afore-mentioned authorities, who called the police. Hoffner was escorted off the field in the middle of a practice. He was arrested and charged with making child porn.

Not everybody out there is crazy. Though the prosecutor and the University were absolutely determined to save our society from this terrifying threat to public morality, a judge quickly threw the case out. Sometimes you are more amazed at good sense than at hysteria. I am amazed. She saw exactly what I think any rational person would see: young, innocent children playing, naked. There was nothing pornographic about the videos at all.

The police seized Hoffner’s computers at home and found nothing.

Todd Hoffner’s wife, not surprisingly, ridiculed the charges. After all, it was she who put the kids in the tub together in the first place, naked. She believes the children have a healthy, natural, playful attitude towards their bodies. Many intelligent people believe that.

Hoffner, in an interview with ESPN said this: “You make a simple mistake and it turns your life upside down”. He’s wrong: he didn’t make a mistake. There was not a thing wrong with what he did.

The University human resources department appears to be terrified. They don’t act terrified in public– well, yes they do: they have drawn over themselves a cloak of secrecy. They suspended Hoffner for using the company phone to take personal pictures (no word on the results of their investigations into all of their other staff to see just how many of them have also broken this rule– I’ll bet some HR staff themselves have broken it). Then they fired him for unstated reasons.

I believe they don’t have any reason to fire him except for this: they look like complete idiots. They look like unspeakably stupid hysterical barbaric irrational zealots. And they know it. There is only one way they think they can rescue their reputations: by pretending that they found something else.

And thus, on an NPR site, in the comments, someone says, explaining why they fired Hoffner after a judge found him innocent, “they must have something else: do you think they are stupid?”

Yes, I do.  Oh yes I do!  More than ever.

Afterthought

With all the DNA testing going on and the resultant exonerations of people who have served, in some cases, ten, fifteen, twenty years in prison (and sometimes on death row), it is not unusual to see a DA hunker down and insist, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the man is guilty, guilty, guilty!

Like the University of Mankato HR staff, they refuse to take responsibility for the massive damage they have done to an innocent man. It’s human nature. It’s a part of human nature that often does more damage than any other trait, because many of these people will stomp over anything and anyone to try to prove that they didn’t recklessly destroy a man’s life on the basis of evidence that any intelligent person could have read differently.

And More on the Assholes at Minnesota State University

Minnesota State destroyed notes from its controversial investigation of Hoffner, and the Minnesota legislative auditor’s office meanwhile said it was “surprised” that the school’s investigator, an affirmative action officer, “destroyed her contemporaneous interview notes” when she conducted an investigation for Richard Davenport, the college’s president.[4][5] The school’s investigator conducted flawed interviews in which questioning was not recorded or conducted under oath.[6][7]   Wiki

Of course they did.

For the record, an arbitrator ruled in Hoffner’s favor and he was reinstated as Head Coach in 2014.  He went on to win the NSIC Championship, whatever that is.

And we just know– we know– that the administrators who destroyed their notes were never punished.

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Rashomon Zimmerman

Anyone familiar with my previous comments on the police and murder investigations and wrongful convictions might be a bit surprised at my take on the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. Many people seem to have settled into a comfortable consensus that a suspicious Zimmerman chased Martin through a quiet neighborhood on a rainy night, even after the police dispatcher told him not to, and tried to detain him, because Martin was black, and then assaulted him and, when Martin defended himself, shot him to death. And that is almost indisputably what happened. Martin is dead, Zimmerman had the gun. Martin did not go looking for a guy in a pick-up truck. Zimmerman was looking for burglars.

The part that is hard to figure out is what happened exactly at the moment Zimmerman met Martin. The first narrative is that Zimmerman tried to detain or stop Martin from returning to the condo where he was staying with his father’s fiancé at the time, and when Martin refused to remain with him to wait for the police, Zimmerman tried to physically restrain him and a struggle ensued. During the struggle, Zimmerman reached for his gun and shot Martin in the chest. By this account, yes, Zimmerman was shooting in self-defense, in a sense: against a man resisting his attempt to detain him without cause. Given a richer understanding of all the information we have, that seems like the fairest explanation of why Zimmerman did have signs of injury on his face. No rational person can believe, in the least, that he simply walked up to Trayvon Martin and shot him. There was an altercation.

Zimmerman claims that Martin surprised him. But Zimmerman had left his car to go looking for Martin. I doubt we’ll ever know if Martin, knowing Zimmerman was following him, decided to confront him, or Zimmerman, trying to justify shooting an unarmed man, made it up. In Zimmerman’s parable, Martin says “you got a problem”? That’s good dialogue. That makes sense, in a way.

There are photos of Zimmerman’s face that show rather convincingly that he did take some abuse during the altercation. There is some evidence– fairly strong– that he called for help before the shooting. There is very convincing evidence that he followed Trayvon Martin and confronted him. Zimmerman was not wearing a police uniform because he was not a cop. He did not appear to have identified himself as a “neighborhood watch” official, as if. He was just a citizen with a gun in a nation that has insanely stupid laws about guns. As far as Trayvon Martin was concerned, this was just some prick following him and looking for a fight. Trayvon Martin is black. He knows what it’s like to be an instant suspect.

Under existing U.S. law and jurisprudence, if Trayvon Martin had had a gun, he could have simply shot and killed Zimmerman for following him in the dark. “Stand your ground”, man. In fact, let this be a cautionary tale for all black young men in the U.S.: join the NRA and start packing. And the first piece of information you want to get out there after you shoot somebody is “I was frightened” and “I am a member of the NRA exercising my sacred God-given right to defend myself”. You’ll be fine.

Yes, if the law were applied equally.

But, in fact, I suspect that if Martin had done so, he would have been arrested and charged with murder immediately, and the motive would have been robbery, and there would have been no long delay while people publicly disputed whether any racism was involved or if Zimmerman were on drugs, and the NRA would have not have stepped up to defend Martin’s sacred right to use a gun to defend himself when a strange mixed-race man approaches him in the dark. Does anyone doubt this? I’m open minded. Show a similar case.

This doesn’t obscure the fact that Zimmerman is a jerk precisely in the sense that he is a product of a mentality and culture that believes we would all be safe if we all had guns, safer than we would be if nobody had guns. But he is not a jerk in the sense that he seemed to be looking for someone to kill. He did something criminally stupid and he should be punished for criminal stupidity, but I haven’t seen any evidence to indicate that he acted out of malevolence.

 

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Amanda Cox Seeks a “Package”

What ABC could and did offer, instead, was an hour in prime time; teases of the interview on “World News”, the newly first -place morning show “Good Morning America”, “nightline,” and ABC’s local TV and radio affiliates.  Within the industry this is called the “package”. NY Times, February 12, 2013

The real package is, of course, Amanda Knox, who will enthrall millions of Americans on April 30 on ABC “News”. This is not news. It’s not journalism. It is the nauseous give and take of exploitation and titillation and scandal marketing. It is the news division committing incest with the entertainment division. The business of this entire process is not information or enlightenment or insight but how to disguise voyeurism as respectable information intercourse. We are all going to do the dance because we are happy to pretend to be appalled or sympathetic or curious or informed while   experiencing the thrill of dirty sex with a sexually vibrant young woman whose room-mate was murdered.

Amanda has a book to sell.

There is no personal experience so tragic or distasteful that the media are not willing to profit from it, nor women like Amanda Knox. But it will be packaged carefully. There will be some higher purpose given for the book, so readers won’t feel like they are expressing a prurient curiosity when picking it up at the bookstore. Let’s see– it’s a cautionary tale for young American women because she just doesn’t want anyone else to go through the ordeal she went through. Or a diatribe against the pernicious Italian justice system. Or let’s go with the Oprahfied version: “I just felt that it was time to tell MY story. There will be something about honoring the memory of her room-mate. There will be talk about who will play her in the movie. HBO or Hollywood? Can she sing? If yes, there’s always dinner theatre.

I do have a feeling she will eventually marry her body guard and go off somewhere and hide. She’s not made for this. The money is too tempting, but she’s not made for this and she may not handle it well.

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Fatal Revision: Jeffrey MacDonald

The problem with Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald is that it really looks like he dun it. The bigger problem is that few people seem to care about the idea that constitutional protections against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment matter. Even fewer people are willing to pay the price to ensure that those constitutional protections are actually respected by the government. I’m serious: very few Americans, who sing hymns to freedom and democracy at the tops of their longs, actually care about freedom.

They are far more excited by punishment.

And let me walk back a bit from my opening statement: the evidence by which many people, like myself, have concluded that Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald probably murdered his wife and his two children is not reliable. As everyone knows by now– even the prosecution– the emergency crews and investigators from the army mucked around MacDonald’s apartment at will, moving evidence, touching items, removing items (including, apparently, MacDonald’s wallet), and generally destroying the credibility of any conclusions drawn by subsequent forensic examinations. You just can’t trust any of the forensic data because no serious effort was made to ensure that evidence had not been tampered with. The chutzpah of the FBI (check) team that allegedly “reconstructed” events in the apartment the night of the murders is beyond belief.

Dr. James Brussel, appointed by the Judge to “examine” Dr. MacDonald, came to the conclusion that MacDonald was a homicidal psychopath. He didn’t actually meet with MacDonald. He just read the case files.

Dr. Brussel was famous for having diagnosed the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo.

Who turned out, of course, to not be the Boston Strangler.

And that’s that.

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Privatizing Abuse

I am not a lawyer. I am a citizen. As a citizen, I vote for a political party at election time hoping that the party I vote for wins. The party that wins has a mandate from the voters to govern. We all generally accept that even if I didn’t vote for the winning party, I will respect the fact that this party has a mandate to govern. In the process of governing, this party can hire individuals to perform certain tasks and functions on behalf of the government. One of those functions is the justice system. The government can hire police who then have the authority to arrest a person if the police have evidence that this person has committed a crime. If convicted of breaking the law, a person may be locked up in a prison and guarded by other individuals hired by the government for that purpose. If you assault a police officer or guard– unless, as is sometimes likely, you have a good reason– you are essentially assaulting a legitimate representative of the government. These representatives of the government have the authority to use physical force if necessary to enforce the law.

They swear to it. And they swear that they will serve the constitution and the laws of the state — not the will of any political party or business or church.

I have never understood why it is believed in some quarters that  such authority can be transferred to a private company. I have never accepted that this can be done, that it can be legitimate in the strict sense of the word, or that we owe the slightest respect to the “authority” supposedly held by any such individual.

In fact, I think I do understand. It is a lie.

In my humble opinion, a private company cannot be given the authority that is normally vested in the government. A private company cannot have the legitimacy to enforce public laws and statutes because a private company is fundamentally exactly what it is: a private company. It does not have a public mandate. It was not elected. It does not swear allegiance to the constitution or to the laws of the nation.

The employees of this company cannot be responsible both to their employer and to the government. They are paid to provide a profit-making service to their employer. They are not paid to “enforce the law”. That is ridiculous– they don’t get fired if the law isn’t enforced. They get fired if they fail to help the company make a profit. They are not accountable to elected representatives of the people: they are accountable to shareholders. If an employee of one of these companies violates the constitution by using force to detain a citizen, he doesn’t get fired; he gets outsourced.

In my opinion, the government cannot contract out it’s own mandate; it cannot sell it’s legitimacy. It cannot attach it’s authority to anybody but itself. No moreso than it can sell the nation out from under your feet to the highest bidder, pay itself huge bonuses, and retire to the Cayman Islands.

A government cannot outsource it’s own constitutional accountability.

Imagine, if you will, that an election is held, and, say, George Bush wins the election. He has a mandate to govern. Suppose he says, now that I’m president, I’m going to appoint James Dobson to the presidency. And then suppose James Dobson goes around issuing orders, raising taxes, dumping people off welfare and Medicare, and appointing justices to the Supreme Court, and ordering the arrest of witches. Would a court uphold a trial of a witch because James Dobson is the president of the United States and has the authority to order the arrest of witches? No. Not, of course, without a good deal of corruption.

In my opinion, anyone imprisoned in a privately owned facility that the government has contracted with to hold prisoners, has a legitimate right to use force against the staff of that prison, for the staff are kidnappers. A prisoner could rightfully say, I will respect the right of a police officer or a duly appointed state official to arrest and detain me. You are not a police officer. You may not use force against me. If you do, I will charge you with assault.

We do “allow” soldiers to kill during wartime. You could argue that that right is dubious as well, but let’s humour the militarists for a moment and accept that there can be a legitimacy to a “war”, like, say Iraq (which was not an act of self-defense). What authority to kill they do have comes solely from the fact that they are representative of a nation that is legally at war with another country. No business entity can be in such a state. There is no legal framework for a business to declare war on a country. If a business did declare war on a country, it’s leaders and owners would be arrested as… .terrorists, actually. At the very least, they would be regarded as criminals.

Do the privately contracted individuals carrying out military duties in Afghanistan have any legitimacy? How can they possibly have the right to kill people when they do not represent the government?

You probably think, I’m sure the top legal minds in the country have had a look at this issue before the government went ahead and started contracting out all these services and functions. You might be wrong. The move to privatize prisons and war and other government functions was largely driven by (corrupt) political ideology. (I say “corrupt” because, over and over again, this outsourcing ends up being a financial bonanza for well-connected private firms and don’t save the taxpayer any money at all– look at Blackwater.)

I would also note that the Supreme Court in the U.S. no longer has much authority itself: it’s dominated by a bunch of hack Republican appointees who virtually never vote against the party line.