A frosty but sunny day in Seattle. Trees, still yellow-leafed, shine golden against the blue sky as I traipse across the UW campus. The "mountain is out," as we say in our quaint local patois. Excited students, purple-clad, drift toward the stadium, hoping against hope to watch the Golden Bears be vanquished in this afternoon's game. Life is good, and in times like these my fancy lightly turns to thoughts of, well ... murder, punishment, ruined lives.
Three recent news items:
- Item. An Italian court in Perugia has found Amanda Knox, age 22, a former honors student at the University of Washington, guilty of knifing to death a fellow exchange student, and has sentenced her to 26 years in prison.
- Item. An Indiana boy, 17, reportedly has admitted that, while wrestling with his 10-year-old brother, he killed him with a chokehold. His brother's last words were, "Andrew, stop." He then further strangled his brother and hit his head against a rock to make sure he was dead. The defendant, a good student and apparently well-liked at school, says he'd been wanting to kill someone ever since eighth grade.
- Item. A Missouri girl, 15, a lazy but gifted student, reportedly has admitted killing a 9-year-old neighbor by strangling and stabbing her, and then slitting her throat. The defendant says she killed the girl because "she wanted to know what it felt like."
Three promising lives, ended practically before they began. Three more promising lives, essentially ended or soon to be ended by the judicial system.
Assuming all three defendants are, in fact, guilty1, it's hard to dispute the lengthy sentences they will receive. And yet, whenever I read of a young person sentenced to life imprisonment, or to a term ensuring that they will not be released until late middle age, my mind rebels at the waste involved.
I recall myself at age 17, say, or 15 -- and I remember stupid things I may have done at that age. Nothing that would have brought me into the criminal justice system, thank God, but just dumb decisions that make me wonder now who that dumb kid was and what I could have been thinking of. What would it be like to reach the age of 40, say, having spent over half of your life in jail, and know that you were in prison, and would stay in prison, because of some act committed by a 15-year-old idiot who you could hardly recognize as even being yourself. But that's the fate reserved for these kids.
We learn in law school that criminal punishment has four principal objectives: retribution, protection of society, deterrence, and rehabilitation. As modern Americans, we like to believe that our principal goal is at least to attempt rehabilitation. But in murders as egregious as these three (and especially the latter two), where the murders are so willful and the pain to the survivors so devastating, we recall the original reason the criminal justice system was created: to grant the sovereign the exclusive right of retribution, in order to prevent private retribution and self-perpetuating family feuds.
None of the three defendants will be subject to the death penalty. We are thus spared the spectacle of the state killing in order to deter and punish killing. But the deliberate waste of the obvious gifts and talents these three young people might someday have brought to society may be a price we have to pay to preserve domestic peace and order.
A dark cloud seems to pass over the sun as I continue on my walk across the beautiful campus -- the beautiful campus that Amanda Knox once called home.
---------------------------------1Ms. Knox will appeal her conviction. Under Italian law, her appeal apparently results in a de novo trial by a higher court. Her conviction is not considered final until the appeal runs its course.
2 comments:
Truly disturbing items. However, it does strike me as odd that people are so shocked when an intelligent or well-behaved young person does something like this. It seems to me the kids who do these things are usually intelligent and well-behaved. Either that, or on medications that completely fuck their brains over.
Very good observation, one that didn't occur to me.
I wonder if it's because middle class media are more interested in middle class kids? If a child in a ghetto kills another child, is the story buried in the police reports? Or if does get a front page headline, maybe the story doesn't have the staying power of these others, because the readers aren't that interested.
I know that I react more strongly to a story about crimes by people in whom I can see myself or my family members. And people who read newspapers tend to be themselves -- as you put it -- intelligent and well-behaved.
Or maybe kids who aren't middle class have so many problems in their lives, just staying alive and keeping themselves housed and fed, that they don't have time to sit around wondering if it might be fun to kill someone.
Post a Comment