Affluenza As Liar’s Paradox

“But obviously having a true belief is not going to keep you out of prison. ”

No, but the underlying causes that make the belief true might keep you out of prison.

The law prohibits certain actions, and also excepts certain classes of agents from those prohibitions. It is illegal to give someone a drug of a certain class, unless you are a licensed MD.

If you are a licensed MD, acting within your license, then you will believe that you are a member of an exempt class. And your belief will be true! And you won’t go to prison for giving that drug, even if an ordinary citizen would go to prison.

What keeps the MD out of prison: their true belief? No; rather, what keeps them out of jail is the very thing that makes their true belief true: the existence of an exempt class and their membership in it.

So the kid belongs to an exempt class–sc. rich white people–and truly believes that he belongs to an exempt class. What keeps him out of prison? Not the true belief, but the underlying facts that make the belief true, sc. his membership in an exempt class.

Which means that this part of your antilogy does not go through:

“But obviously having a true belief is not going to keep you out of prison. (There’s no such thing as the sanity defense.) So he has to go to prison.”

Nope. His membership in an exempt class keeps him out of prison, and renders his belief true. So he does not have to go to prison.

That’s how the judge and jury saw it: he is white enough, and wealthy enough, that the law does not apply to him. They believed it, and he believed, and his belief was true! No paradox. No jail time.

And no justice in Texas. Four people dead.

There’s no such thing as the sanity defense.

I prefer “There is no sanity clause.”

I have read criminal lawyers and judges to be very uncomfortable when people write someone “got off” when in fact the person receives a suspended sentence or probation or (in other cases) community service, restitution etc. The kid, as far as I understand, remains convicted of a felony.

With family cataclysms and conferences I was unable to form an opinion about this particular case. In general, I tend to believe that with teenagers, a therapeutic approach and avoidance of prison sentences should prevail. Your “liar’s paradox” point still stands as it is unlikely a poor kid would have received such a considerate approach. This said, pace details of the case that would turn my opinion towards “prison should have been chosen”, I’m not sure I should be unhappy if a young offender receives what I consider to be an adequate treatment just because the majority of kids in his case would not be so lucky.

I’ll start to think that affluenza is a real thing when medical professionals come up with a name for it that isn’t a cheap pun.

“I’ll start to think that affluenza is a real thing when…”

Well, since there is already a rehabilitation facility near Newport Beach, California that treats it for $450K/year, it has to be at least somewhat real.

If sentenced to jail, the maximum time served would be 2 years (transition out of juvenile status means out of that system). 10 years supervision is not limited in that way.

Well, since there is already a rehabilitation facility near Newport Beach, California that treats it for $450K/year, it has to be at least somewhat real.

Ha, but that’s a paradox on its own, for if you are in the position to pay $450K to cure yourself from affluenza, then surely you are suffering from it right now!

“Tell some of the inmates there, many of them doing many years in prison for far less serious offences that kid didn’t get off.”

But at the end of the day he is a kid. His brain is not fully developed and his punishment should reflect that shouldn’t it?

Ben 12.16.13 at 9:35 am

“It breaks down because the defense doesn’t rest on the kid’s belief being true or not. It rests on his being a kid, a minor.”

Google for the phrase ‘tried as an adult’. Also (too lazy to search and link), the original reports for this mentioned many other cases where juveniles were slammed very hard for things like this, or less so.

“The judge was straight bought off, right?”

Yeah, could be. But part of the point of a society based around ideologies (white supremacy, plutocracy) is that the pay-offs and paybacks don’t have to come in envelopes. They are more pervasive and more seamlessly integrated into life in the community.

Steven Williams: “I’ll start to think that affluenza is a real thing when medical professionals come up with a name for it that isn’t a cheap pun.”

Well, in adults it is plainly a character disorder. How about Sociopathic Entitlement Disorder?

So, one of the things that people often say about systems of social discrimination (in this case, wealth and race seem to be relevant) is that we can’t necessarily blame the individuals who happen to be privileged by them. There is no strict assumption that all white people are racist, or that all men are patriarchalists (is that the word?), and to a certain extent they themselves are oppressed by the role society has given them; they certainly didn’t all choose it. The argument of this defendant seems to be exactly that – he has been mistreated by society’s failure to teach him responsibility for his actions, and it’s not his fault that he behaved as he did. He’s too young to have had time to consider how the world really works, to figure out that his own privilege doesn’t extend to the ability to kill people and make it all OK again afterwards.

On that basis, there is at least some ground for a lenient sentence. He may grow up and come to realise that he should not have done what he did, and internalise that principle enough to ensure that he does not do it again. From the point of view of society, that’s a good outcome! A better one would have been that he never killed those people in the first place, but it does not seem unreasonable to hope that he might still have a useful life ahead of him, in which he does more good than harm to the rest of society.

The problem seems to be that such understanding is only ever extended to people like him, where any criminal act is presumed to be a momentary lapse of reason, a deviation from the otherwise ‘normal’ path for children of the wealthy. A 16-year-old poor kid is unlikely to receive the same understanding – his crimes are likely to be taken as a sign of his criminal nature, with no presumption that he is likely to grow up a better man. So, on the one hand we have the argument that individuals should be viewed as just that – individuals who cannot be blamed for the circumstances of their birth and upbringing – and the reality that people very much are judged by those things. On that basis, I don’t find the sentence to be problematic nearly so much as the fact that such sentences are incredibly rare and, like so many things, unevenly distributed.

Belle, it’s more corrupt than that: they didn’t even have to pay the judge. All they had to do was convince her that there was a real chance to “save” this kid through expensive intensive treatment — which is all about wealth and class (and, affluenza smokescreen aside, may well be a reasonable proposition) — and that they had could afford it.

The real scandal here is in the second point: only rich kids get the second chance, because the second chance is expensive, and the state ain’t paying .

Many of the comments follow the irony of the OP to the problem of social discrimination, when the problem may be one of scarce resources.

The kid is still a child, legally and morally, and not entirely responsible for his actions. And, it is not a diffuse “society” which failed to teach him moral responsibility, but his parents. The parents are, in effect, being fined a reported $450,000 a year, to finance an attempt at rehabilitation, an attempt to undo their bad parenting.

Evidently, the parents have that kind of cash, so this is a feasible option.

And, it’s only an attempt: it comes with a 10 year period of probation — so now, for this young man, any number of minor infractions common to people his age — even poor people — will land him in jail for an extended period.

Most young people growing up in America — roughly 50% — will grow up in or near poverty. Something like 20% will experience some time brushing up against the UN’s global poverty standard of $2 a day. There aren’t adequate resources to bring them up the first time, so, not surprisingly, there aren’t adequate resources to “rehabilitate” them. They are cheap goods, produced cheaply, and if it turns out badly, it is better to throw them away, and at least give the prison-industrial complex a chance to create jobs for the remainder.

There really are not enough resources for everyone. We have to choose who to throw away. It would be foolish to throw away the rare someone, for whom resources are available. If nothing else, think of the people at the rehabilitation clinic, who surely want the $450,000 a year, even if they are not successful. Do the prisons, which will will charge $50,000 a year to warehouse the miscreant, deserve him more?

“The real scandal here is in the second point: only rich kids get the second chance, because the second chance is expensive, and the state ain’t paying .”

You know what? I wish I had posted this.

“ordinary people ought to be left alone in their obscurity”

I agree. But killing four people is hardly ordinary.

@Bianca, could you expand some more on that? To me, this doesn’t feel like too much tragedy to be whimsical about, it’s just too far away for that. I basically think it’s OK to joke about most stuff in the newspaper, even when the news is a tragedy to those involved.

But I might definitely be wrong about that, and I am interested to hear where you would draw the lines.

Down with the prisons, viva reeducation camps.

I am someone who spends quite a bit of time with teenagers from extremely wealthy families, and I have to say that my reaction wasn’t “yeah, I see how this (the ‘affluenza’ causing inability to understand consequences) could happen”, but rather “what utter horses*%t”. If nothing else, upper class American high schools hammer their kids with various safe driving messages in a way totally absent when I was in hs in the distant years of the Carter and Reagan administrations. Additionally (and accidentally) the college admissions process definitely teaches the perception that actions have consequences. Just last Friday I was consoling the daughter of a billionaire who had been rejected outright by the Ivy to which she had ED’d. She’s acutely aware of the fact that a string of C’s in 9th and 10th grade have consequences. (Sometimes this is perceptual only, as well-qualified folks get rejected, and tell themselves “if only I’d done/not done x, I would have got in.”)

Regarding the various discussions of what penalties should be, I have long held that we would get comprehensive immigration reform no more than one week after ICE sweeps through Paradise Valley (the most affluent Phoenix suburb) rounding up every housewife who has employed an undocumented maid/gardener, and taking them all off to Joe Arpaio’s tent city jail. There’s not going to be any substantial reform of the way that we look at juvenile crime for as long as the only lengthy prison sentences are handed down to “those people.”

Would you pay $450,000 a year to keep your teen-aged son from being gang-raped? That’s what these parents are doing.

From dallasvoice.com:

Welcome to Texas, prison rape capital of the U.S. …
A 2008 study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 4.5 percent of all inmates in America report sexual assaults. The same study ranked five Texas prisons among the 10 U.S. prisons with the highest rates of inmate-reported sexual assaults.
In those five prisons, between 9 percent and 16 percent of all inmates report incidents of rape by fellow prisoners and prison staff…
According to Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch, prison rapists tend to target young, physically weak Caucasians — usually first-time, nonviolent offenders who seem kind, unaggressive, shy or intellectual….
TDCJ inmate Roderick Johnson, who’s openly gay, entered the Allred Unit near Wichita Falls in September 2000 on nonviolent charges of burglary, cocaine possession and cashing a bad check, according to multiple news reports about his case.
After Johnson’s arrival, he quickly came under the ownership of the Gangster Disciples, a prison gang that hadn’t had a sex slave for a while… Johnson spent the next 18 months being orally and anally raped in the cells, stairwells and showers of Allred prison every day by men he called “a pit of vipers” and “a pack of wolves,” the news reports say. ..
Rape survivors like Young and Johnson have to overcome several obstacles before they can even report an incident: They must survive the assault, then deal with the shock and disgust of violation without cleaning the evidence off their bodies by showering, brushing their teeth or drinking.
Often, fear of retaliation and shame will prevent survivors from immediately reporting attacks. And those who do don’t always have witnesses to help corroborate their tale.
They might also face a barrage of victim-blaming questions from prison officials such as, “How did you let that happen? Why did you go there in the first place? Why didn’t you tell anyone sooner?” — questions that imply they possibly deserved the assault and should feel ashamed, if they don’t already…
The American Civil Liberty Union’s National Prison Project eventually sued the TDCJ in April 2002 for violating Johnson’s constitutional rights protecting against cruel and unusual punishment and guaranteeing equal protection under the law, based on his race and sexual orientation. But in 2005, a jury dismissed the lawsuit…
Johnson now lives on parole in Austin, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, taking anti-depressants and facing nightmares and suicidal thoughts each day…
JDI’s McFarlane says it’s impossible to know how many prison assaults end in death, how many prisoners pass away due to complications from AIDS, other untreated STDs, and injuries and suicide — the mental and physical toll is enormous.

Chaz – I understand the way the criminal justice system works and how it’s fucked up. But that’s not what Bruce talked about. He writes

There really are not enough resources for everyone. We have to choose who to throw away.

He’s making a statement about society as a whole, not about the perspective of an individual sentencing judge. That’s what I’m disputing. There are enough material resources to try to rehabilitate drug offenders. The lacking resource is political/societal will.

40:He needed to assume the Golden Rule in order to enable the remorseless advance of capital to the point of the universal immiseration that would lead to revolution.

You are missing the part about how the proletariat gains ideological independence, gains freedom from the ruling ideas (which incidentally, are the dominant productive relationships expressed as ideas). Is the Revolution really inevitable? How is it possible?

German Ideology Section “Ruling ideas” at the bottom

b) Gramsci Athusser etc. GI is very early Marx, and earliest Marxism.

c) From the link.

“The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”

It is the contention of some of us, after the death of mass media and means of propaganda, that, to the extent the ruling class ever had the control of mental production, that age is over, and production of ruling ideas has become democratized.
Unfortunately, the producers (Us! here!) are not socialists or a revolutionary class.

@Bianca, I am afraid I am not really getting your point. There’s something you apparently consider obvious, and it’s not obvious too me. There might be a cultural barrier here: for example, is it usual in the US that papers publish the names of the people involved like here?

if taken as true

! You have actually met teenagers? You were one?

bob mcmanus: We would like all kids to get treatment instead of twenty years.

Would we? Are you sure? Because I’m not necessarily getting that from the discussion. Simple retribution, without hoary about the perpetrator being a victim, or the value of redemption, does have its fans. On bad days, I might even be one.

I think the bereaved families and friends of the deceased were expecting just retribution, and are disappointed that they didn’t get it.

“My point is that they are.”

And my question is should they be?

44:

I don’t think that possession of the technical means to distribute ideas has much bearing on what people believe. We’ve had writing for several millenia, and it’s been relatively cheap to produce and distribute these things called “books” for centuries. Even if the powers that be did have huge advantages in getting their ideas disseminated, under the Golden Rule, they will disseminate what sells. If Dickens and Upton Sinclair and Capra sell, the publishers and studios will fall all over themselves selling the rope that could be used to hang them. If such ideas no longer sell, if you have to go with action, or sex, or patriotism to sell to a mass audience, it certainly seems difficult to blame that on any counter-revolution in the media. You had people like Ayn Rand writing “counterrevolutionary” stuff, but that stuff never had wide appeal, never got translated into commercially successful books or movies. If Randian ideas have won, they’ve done so somewhere off the field of the media. They won because they appeal to rich idiots who never actually read Rand, or rich idiot wannabes, and most people these days think that being rich means you can’t really be an idiot, you must be so smart that it’s only natural that the rules should be written to make it easier for you to go about your job-creating work.

People are not going to be ready in any numbers for salutary counter-messages until they at least stop believing that the Golden Rule is inevitable, if not the just order of things. Until then, even media not in direct control of the power that be will still glorify at least the ruling ideas, if not the powers that be personally, or they will fail to achieve success.

People aren’t going to stop believing in the Golden Rule until it fails. Maybe you can help people perceive the failure earlier by writing books and making films or Youtubes. We all hope that people will understand the failure of capitalism before we hit bottom and have a violent revolution. Maybe we will draw back from the brink, as we did a century ago with social democracy. And maybe Dickens and Sinclair were important in getting us to draw back from the abyss. I just don’t see that media availability has much to do with it. Produce a compelling novel or movie if you want to chip away at the Golden Rule before it completely self-destructs and takes us all with it, but don’t rely on the availability of new media modalities to do the job without works of great power informed by the real-world failure of the Golden Rule. And if you can create such works, you won’t have to go guerrilla to get them disseminated. The capitalists will gladly sell the rope in the mass media as long as there’s a margin in it for them.

MPAVictoria 12.16.13 at 7:49 pm

“My point is that they are.”

“And my question is should they be?”

I know I am but what are you?

What criminal is more lauded than the jewel thief?

How nice to imagine the wonder of a world where money and power have no influence and cases are decided solely on the basis of what’s “right” for the victims and “best” for the defendant.

Does someone know someplace or some period of time where such a justice code was in operation or is this whole discussion just as hypothetical as the Paradox of the Court?

Any defendant has at most two resources – time and money. Why wouldn’t a person with the later try to use it. Inevitably the family will also compensate the victims and I’ll cynically imagine that at the moment the check clears the victim’s families will be just a little less outraged about whether justice is served white or green.

“Any defendant has at most two resources – time and money. ”

And, apparently, the deference to wealth. There’s the fact that wealth can buy you a better defense. . . but then there’s the fact that the system favors the wealthy, which is completely different.

Your world weary cynicism is more annoying than you realize.

The big problem here is the presumption of automobility. In America, as long as you’re sober, you can murder anybody with a car and not go to jail. In NYC you won’t even get a ticket. If people shouldn’t be held responsible for murdering people with cars because they’re too young or too old, or being driving is hard and accidents happen, then the obvious thing is to get rid of cars, or at least sharply restrict who gets to drive.

There are alternatives to imprisonment:

http://www.rand.org/health/feature/24-7.html

Bloix at 6:27 pm:
Yes. The feral realities of incarceration, the soul damage, the complete transformation of personality in exactly the opposite direction from the supposed intent. It isn’t just rape, it’s all the power dynamics of prison. Rape’s the creepiest for the distant uninformed and unaware.
But then why should rich parents be able to buy their kids out of that?
Democracy Now! had a clip from Anderson Cooper, itself a cultural anomaly, where Cooper contrasted the affluenzic kid with a black 14 yr old who punched someone who then fell and as a consequence of falling died. Same judge. She wanted to send him to rehabilitation something somewhere but no program would take him (got to keep those success rates up for the cash flow!). He got 10 years inside.
Showed no remorse is part of the rationale.
But isn’t remorse itself a kind of luxury, a by-product of the freedom of wealth?
–
The UK Daily Mail which I only got to because of my search engine had this at the end of its article on the judge, the victims, and the case:
Breanna’s mother, Marla Mitchell, said she was ‘mad’ about the sentence and embraced the families of the other victims outside of the courtroom.
‘He’ll be feeling the hand of God, definitely,’ she told WFAA.com. ‘He may think he got away with something, but he hasn’t gotten away with anything.’
So…we could just shut down the entire legal system, and let God run some hands-on justice for us?
Or…not give people with bizarre ideas like that a voice in what meagre justice we do have?
There’s a reason the statue of Justice is wearing a blindfold, right?
That 14 yr old was already in the prison of being poor and uneducated and black.
The drunk-driving rich kid’s birth certificate had a get-out-of-jail-free card embossed on it, from the get.

“Spoken like a person who has only ever lived in a big city.”

Nope, grew up in the sticks, but now urban by choice. You know, people lived in villages and towns long before there were cars. And cars are more dangerous to rural and suburban people than they are to city folk. That’s the main reason cities are the safest place to be.

btw, I originally spelled defence with a c and got a red underline, so I “fixed” it. I think you’ve got some fawlty software.

Quite some problems traversed in this thread. Answers? Solutions? (i.e. solutions that maintain the Natural Order of Things. Of course.)

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust.

I do therefore humbly offer it to publick consideration, that of the hundred and twenty thousand children, already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle, or swine, and my reason is, that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded by our savages, therefore, one male will be sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune, through the kingdom, always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump, and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.

Swift, J., 1729. For preventing the children of poor people … etc. etc

All I know is I would hate to be family to those killed by this very spoiled, very rich baby.

I’ll take a killing machine too please.

Sure, some form of ‘treatment’ is going to beat incarceration. But is it really necessary to upend capitalism to make it available to all? As was pointed out upthread, the 50K annual cost of the Big House could provide a lot of therapy. It seems to me that the decision to incarcerate rather than treat is a function of policy, not a function of capitalism. Which is good, because policy should be a lot easier to change.

But beyond the question of the availability of treatment, I’m thinking that some form of restitution is a good thing. Throwing any kid (or adults for that matter) in jail is not perhaps the best thing for them. But what about what’s good for the victims of crime? I’m not talking about petty property crimes … but crimes that involve violence, pain, and death. If it were my kin this kid had killed, I’d be ready to pop seeing him walk away from that act without seeing him hurt, and hurt deeply. Not physically (though I’m sure that urge would be there). But at the very least I’d demand that he see and acknowledge my pain, and I don’t mean in a facile or offhand way. I’d want that little shit to have to face me until I broke him, until he was ready to genuinely and sincerely ask for my forgiveness. Forgiveness I might never be able to give.

The halfway point between therapeutic and retributive urges is some kind of restorative justice model. Up north here there were some experiments with sentencing circles in aboriginal communities (the incarceration rates for aboriginal men, in particular, are shamefully high). In lieu of incarceration, those convicted could choose to be sentenced by a community group. These things most often involved bringing victims and perpetrators of crime together in the search for some kind of resolution. It seems to me that a case like this cries out for this kind of approach.

“From a moral standpoint, it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the opinion for the court.

I’m kind of shocked by the degree to which presumably left-leaning people commenting here are less cognizant of the rationale for juvenile justice system than Justice Kennedy. Well, I guess mass incarceration and school-to-prison pipelines are working nicely for the US… AFAIK, no other Western country even allows trying 16 year olds as adults and in no other Western country would a 20 year prison term even be considered for a minor. Some of the posts here are terribly depressing.
As per merian @8 – the kid didn’t “get away” with anything. He got a lighter sentence than the prosecution wanted. He got convicted of a felony, which even for a rich kid means losing a lot of rights and opportunities (including basic rights such as the right to vote). That also means he admitted fault, which means he and his family are liable for civil damages (as they should be). And he has extensive probation restrictions and requirements.

Criminal defense lawyers said it was not uncommon for minors involved in serious drunken-driving cases and other crimes to receive probation instead of prison time, even in a tough-on-crime region such as North Texas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/14/us/teenagers-sentence-in-fatal-drunken-driving-case-stirs-affluenza-debate.html?_r=0

(I do think the political argument that nothing’s going to change if it doesn’t affect the privileged – e.g. Sophist @39 – is a very valid point. But if you follow recent trends like schools moving away from zero tolerance, awareness of such things as the school to prison pipeline etc. – things are already changing, albeit very gradually. People calling for blood/prisontime in cases such as these make such change harder)

In America cars have killed 3.5 million people, compared to 1.3 million in all wars. Cars kill more Americans annually than guns do, about 35,000 to 30,000.

“In America cars have killed 3.5 million people, compared to 1.3 million in all wars.”

It’s good to remember the small numbers of Americans that get killed in wars relative to non-Americans. Not to trivialize car deaths, but that particular comparison always irritates me.

I’m not so sure judges need to be bribed (although it certainly wouldn’t hurt). In stalinist terms some lawbreakers were categorized as ‘socially close’, and the others as ‘socially alien’ (enemies of the People). I believe something like that may be at work here as well, which also explains the ‘country club prisons’. I bet a Mob boss convicted for tax evasion doesn’t get to go to one of those.

In one case the judge sees an essentially decent kid who made a mistake and deserves another chance. And in another case he might see an enemy of everything we hold dear, enemy of the People. So, perhaps in this particular case they, in fact, neglected to bribe the judge and he retaliated by this very expensive sentence with the 10-year probation.

The idea ‘just because we don’t usually do the right thing doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it in some cases’ was of course a favourite of neocons in relation to selectively starting wars, but is of course repudiated with extreme prejudice when the issue is a boycott of Israeli universities, or other supposed examples of ‘singling out’ Israel. Not that I’m commenting on the substantive merits of either approach.

But in the context of penal law, which is for good reason supposed to be governed by procedure and to be applied even-handedly, there is a fairly obvious reason to be concerned about equal treatment ‘for its own sake’, whether that involves levelling up or down or somewhere in between.

There is also a political aspect.

Obviously part of the immediate cause of this kind of disparity is, as so often, unequal access to high-quality legal counsel. Another is the predictably skewed application of judicial discretion in favour of well-spoken white kids in suit and tie. Another may, for all I know, be bribery – though the only recent US cases in which I’ve hear of that being established related to especially harsh treatment being doled out to the underprivileged so as to enrich the ownes of private prisons.

So long as such sources of special treatment are available to the rich and privileged, along with things like unevenly-applied police and prosecutorial discretion, there will be no incentive for them to support fairer and less brutal treatment for criminal defendants in general. (This is a pretty standard political argument, and some of us would apply it also to to private education and private medicine.)

Unequal access to counsel is easily dealt with (technically easy, that is) – e.g., everyone gets a randomly-assigned lawyer paid from public funds. That would certainly focus the attention of the rich a bit – at least in the case of general procedural provisions, and criminal laws they or their kids might fall foul of. (Laws directed de facto only against muslims fitted up by the FBI, or users of ‘ghetto’ cocaine, or protestors, or the poverty-stricken could still be ignored, of course.)

Go to your nearest medium security prison (let alone maximum security). Tell some of the inmates there, many of them doing many years in prison for far less serious offences that kid didn’t get off.

I spent four years in a medium security prison. Lots of the inmates there called a sentence of extended probation for a first felony offense a “trap off,” designed to allow the state to slam the offender when he violated probation with a much harsher sentence that he would have received if he’d been incarcerated for the original offense.

I am with those saying “if you can’t take responsibility for your actions, your actions should not be allowed to include driving”.

And to those saying that you can’t get around in rural areas without a car, remember that we’re talking about *kids* getting around in rural areas without a car. Which, up until they had a car, they could do by dint of a responsible adult taking them places. Certainly, if you can splash $450k a year on rehab you can afford to let your kid order a few taxis now and then.

At any rate, it’ll all be immaterial in 20 years, when only loonies will drive cars themselves.

@ Lawrence Stuart

Re: sentencing circles, and community based restorative justice programs for offenders.

I support the idea in theory but have recently come across a few publications that have me questioning my support. I’m away from my home library but will try to post the sources later.

In brief, community based sentencing or restorative justice models can fall prey to the social dynamics of the community with offenders from priveleged families receiving greater leniency in their sentences. So much like the Texas case in the OP both systems can demonstrate similar failures.

Such an approach has also proved particularly problematic for women victims of physical and sexual assaults, with many anecdotes from victims of violence stating that they would have preferred the more standard ‘western’ version of justice, where men convicted of such crimes face harsher penalties and where female victims of violence don’t feel pressured by the community to forgive their attacker.

America might be an outlier in punishing juveniles, but apparently we’re also bit unusual in how early we let people drive. Note how frequently “18” shows up here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_minimum_driving_age .

Some of the other countries with similar driving ages also have provisions to try adolescents as adults (e.g. Canada).

I’m glad that SCOTUS ended capital punishment for minors. I think we should also end LWOP for 17 and unders. And I realize that prison safety is a huge problem.

But I don’t remember magically turning vastly more responsible on my 18th birthday. I think that if a 16-year-old kills multiple people, they shouldn’t be free for at least a decade. They should be stuck in some kind of government facility. It doesn’t have to be a prison, but it does have to be at least somewhat punitive–it should be a place 16y.o.s don’t want to be. Not because I think the suffering of the punished is intrinsically good, but because I think civilized respect for the victims calls for at least that much.

If you call that barbaric, then what you and I call civilization are mutually exclusive.

Chatham:

“…but rather over the sentencing of this minor not being harsh enough. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised by our incarceration rates.”

I’m bit tired of the fact that everbody saying this like this (‘…not harsh enough’) is missing the pretty clear fact that most of the outrage is due to the fact that this guy got massive leniency for a felony killing four people, due to the fact that he’s white and from a rich family.

Getting harder and harder to buy a car with a stick shift, though.

“Getting harder and harder to buy a car with a stick shift, though.”
Especially in North America.

And in the “it was ever thus” department… about a decade ago the Roman Catholic Bishop of Phoenix hit a pedestrian, killed him, and then left the scene. Any guesses on how much jail time he did?

Chatham: Actually, yes, a similar sentence (not necessarily a harsh one; my comment above is one of many that decries inequality without advocating a policy of Draconian punishments).

I don’t know if there’s a specific separate offence of ‘causing death by dangerous driving’ in the US as there is in England and Wales, but it’s always struck me as rather unfair that there should be such an element of luck involved: equally dangerous drivers should not be give a lighter sentence just because they happen not to kill anyone; equivalently, those who are unlucky in the homicide department shouldn’t therefore be penalised more harshly than the rest. Personally, I tend toward the view that de facto, in the UK anyway, dangerous but felicitously non-lethal drivers tend to get off too lightly for general deterrent purposes.

12.17.13 at 7:16 pm

Me: I’m bit tired of the fact that everbody saying this like this (‘…not harsh enough’) is missing the pretty clear fact that most of the outrage is due to the fact that this guy got massive leniency for a felony killing four people, due to the fact that he’s white and from a rich family.

Chatham : “So if a minor is driving drunk, loses control of the car and hits someone, what is the appropriate response? Try them as an adult and send them to prison for 10 years? You’re free to think that way, but it definitely puts you closer to the “tough on crime” types that have encouraged harsher penalties and massive incarceration rates.”

Our point, which you seem to be missing yet again, is that if the minor is poor/black/hispanic and in Texas, that would probably be the standard response.

“How about if a minor swerves off the road driving drunk and there’s no one there – should they get a similar sentence for the same action?”

Please stop BS-ing.

I agree with that last clause, bt would ted to quibble about the ‘legal luck’ aspect, since I tend to think thatpuishment is justified only as a necessary part of a deterrent system of laws.

I suppose you would disagree if you think vengeange on behalf of surviving relatives provides a sui generis justfication for additional punishment, or if you think that something like James Stephen’s approach (“The criminal law bears the same relation to the urge for revenge as marriage does to the sexual urge.”) applies, so that a failure to mete out sufficiently harsh punishment for manslaughter would, say, lead to a destabilising epidemic of ‘vigilante’ vengeance. That is of course an entirely empirical issue, and highly dubitable imo.

It would also be necessary to clarify what is to be done in cases where a loner with no family is killed. Presumably, equal treatment of offenders or simplicity of law or something would be drafted in, so that such particulars are held to be irrelevant in individual cases, even though the general policy is based on a presumption that such considerations do often, or usually, apply. Or maybe you bite the bullet and go for an explicitly vengeance-based system, in which the victim’s family decide the punishment.

@108
Our point, which you seem to be missing yet again, is that if the minor is poor/black/hispanic and in Texas, that would probably be the standard response.

You were asked earlier if that should be the standard response and didn’t answer. Some of us care whether or not a sentence is just in addition to whether or not it is equitable. If you think that’s missing the point, well, I disagree.

drivers speeding and not stopping – or even slowing down – for students as they cross at the corner crosswalk at their school

Yes; in the UK we don’t have the barbarous offence of ‘jaywalking’ – pedestrians still in theory have right of way – but drivers very often drive straight at one, expecting one to scuttle out of their way. Brute force in action. Luckily it’s relatively easy, in city contexts and given a reasonable degree of agility anyway, to call their bluff without risking actually being mown down.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some militant pedestrians didn’t start knocking the wing mirrors off cars that do that – the sheer unbelieving shock of the driver at this subversion of the natural order of things would be a delight to see. They have the hard shell, but we are more nimble.

in the UK we don’t have the barbarous offence of ‘jaywalking’ – pedestrians still in theory have right of way

Although jaywalking is not illegal in the UK, pedestrians do not have the right of way (except in some specified situations at pedestrian crossings and road junctions).

@ 91: That’s your own browser’s word-checking software, add it to the custom dictionary with a right-click, if you can, or better yet look up acquiring a British English dictionary.

Man, remembering the confused discussions I had with people trying to explain that my car has an automatic, but the shifting lever is, well, a lever…the new hybrid automatics erase a lot of the potential for error and sloppiness inherent in the completely manual systems, last I heard.

On topic, I tend to extend Kennedy’s rationale for leniency even to adults – as somebody else mentioned you don’t magically become responsible once you cross a threshhold. For me, the big issue is trying to organize the system not around wasteful incarceration but on rehabilitation (so far as that’s effective – unfortunately the apparent randomness of success in individual cases will always militate politically towards punitive systems), and racial biases will always lead juries to think that socially stable people are “more likely not to reoffend” than your poor minority folks.

“Just saw that commercial taken from the Herzog documentary, with the guy who knocked off a carload full of Amish because he was texting “I love you” while driving. Did it while he was all grown up, too. And now he’s Scott-free, apparently. Walking the streets. Even got a nice, forgiving letter from the Amish. Does this drive you crazy?”

Probably alone here but I have never been able to work myself up in an Old Testament lather over some making a mistake. Was it a stupid and foreseeable mistake? Yes, but there was no malice. Just a moment of idiocy. We all have them, most of us are just lucky enough not to kill someone when we do.

You know, I can be petty and vengeful as hell for personal slights, but I don’t pretend that it’s rational or a good model for general principles, let alone law.

geez, why make it complex when a simple answer will do: his parents spent money, got a good Atty, who found a way out
I mean, isn’t the def of a good lawyer someone who gets his client off ?

An oldie but goody:
[Geraldine] Ferraro’s son, John Zaccaro Jr., was convicted in 1988 of selling cocaine to an undercover Vermont state trooper and served three months under house arrest

(imo, a black kid harlem not likely to get only 3 months house arrest)

Stephen Austin – well, ‘pedestrians still have right of way’ was, as the syntax suggests, really only to restate the absence of an offence of jaywalking (or similar). ‘Technically’ rather than ‘legally’ was a bit of a loose term; ‘right of way’ isn’t, as far as I know, usually used as a technical legal term in this context. But pedestrians are permitted to cross the road anywhere (except motorways), aren’t they?

This isn’t the same as ‘priority’, which, practically speaking, comes down to whether a car is supposed to stop to let you cross. Once you’re on the road, the driver had better not drive into you on purpose. At that point there’s not much reason to be concerned about priority rules – perhaps conceivably in a civil suit some tiny quantum of contributory negligence might be imputed or something, in some circumstances; I dunno.

Taking a realist approach, I can certainly say that I have never known the police to take any action against a pedestrian who appears to have been crossing the road in an orderly fashion and can plausibly claim to have instinctively fended off an oncoming vehicle which failed to slow down.

MAVictoria – Was it a stupid and foreseeable mistake? Yes, but there was no malice. Just a moment of idiocy. We all have them, most of us are just lucky enough not to kill someone when we do. Well, those of us who have elected, at some personal cost, to refuse to drive and instead to throw in our lot with the users of public transport are not ‘lucky’ not to kill anyone when we have a ‘moment of idiocy’ – or indeed if we get pissed. One could perfctly well argue that being harmed out of a callous disregard only adds insult to injury – at least a murderer with malice aforethought does one the courtesy of paying attention while killing one.

Consumatopia – 1. At trial, it would be too easy to…, too hard to… – this kind of objection is pretty common and usually mistaken. Courts decide all sorts of issues like this all the time, and when they are operating properly make a reasonably good fist of doing so. ‘How dangerously was this person driving’ is not an unusually difficult thing to decide.
2. The purpose of retribution here is…for the surviving members of the community to reassure each other that their lives matter to each other. I don’t really see how this is supposed to work – still less how it iks supposed to be the best way of doing that. If people expect a cetain kind of retibution and it’s not forthcoming, no doubt they’ll take it as a kind of disrespect, but those expectations are not hard-wired. I’d assimilate this to the rhetoric of ‘sending a message’ – the problem is that generally, the use of penal sanctions is a pretty imprecise and inefficient means of communication.

3. Better to spend that money on malaria reduction and climate change mitigation – that might be right, implausibly assuming, that is, that all resources currently dedicated to everything else less important than (non-malaria-preventing) healthcare has already been diverted to those ends without success, yet success is still in prospect. (In fact, malaria could probably be eliminated quite cheaply were the will there; say, if NASA, RAND, the CIA and the DoD and their entire budgets were all peremptorily repurposed to that end. Ditto climate change, especially since the use of fewer resources would suffice to deal with the latter, even in the absence of any effort to solve the relatively trivial technical issue of clean energy generation.

4. I seem to be one of the few out-and-proud retribution fans here, but I think my motivation here lies behind a lot of other left-leaning policies. – What is that motivation, then, and how does it relate to other left-wing policies? I genuinely don’t get it.

“One could perfctly well argue that being harmed out of a callous disregard only adds insult to injury”

That is very clever sounding and witty (bravo!) but not really sensible unless you are arguing for harsher sentences for manslaughter than murder in the first degree.

Accidents happen. We should work towards reducing them but sending someone to jail for decades over a mistake doesn’t seem right to me. Or a good use of tax payers money for that matter.

Well that is just great comrade McManus, at this rate we will all be living in a leftist paradise with no cars, no booze and 20 years hard time for making a mistake.

Sounds super.

“But the plea for harsher punishments is ultimately a communitarian concern”
Only if we agree with you that harsh punishments for children who are a tragic mistake is good for the community. Which I do not.

It is not a communitarian concern Consumatopia, It is a base urge for revenge and punishment. Real fire and brimstone Old Testament stuff and it is not progressive, at least from my point of view.

It sure isn’t progressive.

I’m not sure what position, is right, but I lean towards the thought that as far as motivations go, I’m with “retribution” being “obviously wrong.”

@MPAV, that’s totally reasonable and in large part I agree with you, but can you see how that might conflict with other progressive goals? A rehabilitation focused penal system might end up imposing lighter penalties on those the state deems to be more capable of rehabilitation. I understand that you think this is unfair (32) but that’s the thing–a purely rehabilitation-focused system doesn’t necessarily care about fairness.

On the one hand McManus is right, on the other hand there must be a reason, besides subjective euphoria, that the names for distilled spirits translate to “water of life” so often.
Possibly because of vermifugical/parasiticidal effects?
People have been drinking – not me, not this morning! – since pre-history.
I was raised around women, my aunts, who were born and well into adolescence before automobilic ubiquity. My grandmother, who I spent a few afternoons with as a very young boy, was born in 1879. She was already raising four of her seven children before cars owned the streets.
She didn’t approve of drinking, backed up by residual Puritanism of hard-shell Baptist anti-fun, but had no precedent, no Biblical guidance, and no readily available cultural standards for judging the machine takeover. It came in subtly at first, then critical-massively with nothing but the banners and fanfare of progress around it.
Anyone who questioned the seduction of power the car and its industrial agents dangled was ridiculed and trivialized.
On the one hand drunk driving, until MADD, was basically, criminally, shrugged off, on the other hand that successful campaign of outraged grief made it seem like the carnage of the road was mostly coming from drunks.
Not even half. And to get to the stats that get it close to half you have to say any presence of alcohol in any involved drivers, causative or no, made it a case of DWI.
The unquestioned acceptance of driving, the hypocritical tolerance/rejection of drinking.
There’s a Darwinian element to that that’s kind of ugly. Instead of some biological disparity/selection, there’s only the inability to foresee danger and avoid it. Survival of the prophetic, or just random culling which is regrettable but somehow morally permissible.
–
Revenge justice has an acceptance built into it, that what happened is over and there isn’t any higher outcome left to strive for than personal gratification, the hungry need for catharsis, with intentional ignorance of the consequences of revenge.
The violent death of a 32 year old crack whore doesn’t call out to the consumer-justice oriented with the same emotional urgency that the violent death of a first-grader does.
The experimental use of dozens of severely retarded institutionalized with terminal consequence isn’t as outrageous as the terrorist car-bomb and its dozens of random “normal” victims. Because?
Because we value some lives much more than others., but we’re forbidden to express that openly.
The essence of rehabilitative justice is the primary goal of making that shit, the crime in question, stop.
Punishment has nothing directly to do with long-range outcome, that has to be rationalized into it. My undocumented evidenceless explanation is the advocates of punishment were traumatically disciplined as children. This becomes internalized. It’s the way it’s supposed to be, you mess up you’re supposed to get hurt. The result is the goal-less suffering inherent in the privatized prison system.
The essence of lex talionis is making the retaliators feel better about things, whether the shit stops or not. Consumer justice, like most forms of consumer-driven morality, goes nowhere good.

Prison sentences are too long, and prison conditions far too harsh and inhumane. But letting this little prick off just because we can explain why he’s rotten is a travesty. The exact same argument that was used by the defense to request leniency here _ought_ to have been used by the prosecution to demand punishment. A spoiled rich kid with no sense of responsibility to others! How did that become a defense argument?