Crime and Punishment

Learning details of the crimes perpetrated by the Golden State Killer and Rapist in the wake of last week's arrest of a suspect, my anti-capital punishment reflexes have been put to the test.  The crimes were vile; the killer, an extremely degenerate sadist.  The numbers by themselves are horrendous: at least 12 murders, more than 50 rapes, over 100 burglaries mostly perpetrated over the decade from 1976 to 1986.  The nature of many of the burglaries reveals the baseness of the killer's modus operandi, which was to inflict as much damage and terror as he could wring from his victims and their families during and after his attacks.  This paragraph from the Wikipedia article gives a flavor:

The offender at times spent hours in the home, ransacking closets and drawers, eating food in the kitchen, drinking beer, raping the female again, or returning to utter more threats to the victims. In some instances, the victims believed he had left their home and began to move, but he then "jump[ed] from the darkness". The offender typically stole items from the victims as well, often selecting personal objects and items of minimal monetary value, although he stole cash and firearms also. The offender would eventually leave in a stealthy fashion, and victims were usually unsure as to whether or not he had left at all. He was believed to escape on foot through a series of yards and then use a bicycle to travel home or to a car. He also made extensive use of parks, schoolyards, creek beds, and other open spaces that allowed him to stay off the street.

Leading up to an attack, he would stalk his victims-- apparently strangers chosen merely from prolonged surveillance of neighborhoods and areas with features he preferred such as wooded abutments that he could use for access and escape --  and prepare his crimes sometimes for months. He relished his victims learning the scope of knowledge he had acquired about them, occasionally calling them sometimes years after the fact to remind them of their encounter with him.  It was the lengths of his preparation that led some investigators to guess correctly that he was or had been a police officer.  Profiling and victim's descriptions had only gotten the investigation so far (did you know that many of his victims reported he had a smaller than average penis?). But it was DNA that id'ed him this past week, giving investigators and victims the hope that they may have actually finally got their man in suspect Joseph James deAngelo.*

As I say, the more I've learned about the crimes, the greater the challenge to my highest ideals about justice.  The death penalty is legal in California but has rarely been carried out since 1972 when it was temporarily abolished as unconstitutional.  Although the penalty was reinstated by voters within months, the state has not executed a prisoner since 2006.  But if there is a case for the death penalty, this man's crimes could just be it.  I can in fact imagine and by proxy enjoy the pleasure and relief of the victims in seeking to return any measure of what was perpetrated on them to their transgressor.  Surely death would be too good for him.  I can for instance imagine the catharsis of conducting the trial with the defendant seated in court with electric cables hooked up to various parts of his body*,  through which his victims could administer jolts at will for every smirk, rolled eyeball  and sigh-- or just for the hell of it.   But for me, the key word is justice, which does inspire me to get my head on straight.

I have two overarching objections to the death penalty, and 2 reasons to prefer permanent incarceration as an alternative.  My first objection alone could be considered adequate: What if the verdict is wrong?  If so, the death penalty is an irreversible mistake on the state's behalf.  What could be more cruel and unusual than for the state to kill the wrong person?  From experience, we've learned that justice is rarely perfect. It convicts the innocent and acquits the guilty.  It is only as good as its practitioners, who have repeatedly been shown to be, as a class, less than ideal.

But in these days of DNA testing and other forensics, and given that in spite of the problems, justice still does occasionally manage to get done, there could still be cases where a conviction is nearly unanimously agreed to be correct, and this could well be one.   Thus, my second objection: if premeditated killing is a crime, the state should not engage in it.  If you do not trust the state to collect taxes, wage wars, pass laws and regulations (and for many reasons in this muddled age of what government is you should not), then it makes no sense to trust the state with premeditated murder.  To illustrate why states should not be entrusted to be impartial (let alone competent) in the administration of this responsibility, one need only look at statistics on race of those executed.  As the US General Accounting Office's own study has shown, "In 82% of the studies [reviewed], race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty, i.e., those who murdered whites were found more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks."  Why would we want to irrevocably imbue any such flawed and capricious entity with the power to kill with impunity-- which is after all a power that we must necessarily grant to it over ourselves?

Compared to my objections to death, my reasons for preferring life are optimistic and idealistic.  The first is my belief that true justice must include the possibility that the guilty can be brought to remorse.  For me this is the essence and ideal of justice, that the perpetrators of crimes against fellow humans can come-- perhaps through empathy training or therapy-- to see the errors of their ways, to see their victims for who they are and not merely as pesky wills to be overcome in getting what they want.   In this way, those justly sentenced to life can properly take part in rehabilitating themselves for as long as they live, which may be as long as it takes for remorse to be achieved.  It could be objected that this is a naive hope. No one knows of a way to bring anything like this about for every shade of narcissistic sociopath, or for those perpetrators who perceive themselves to be victims entitled to reparations from strangers.  Yes, that may be true today.  Can anyone say that there will not be advances in our understanding of how to bring about empathy in a remorseless heart or otherwise reform it tomorrow? 

Which brings me to my second reason for preferring a life sentence: it affords us the opportunity to try to understand the motivations of those who perpetrate the most heinous acts toward prevention of further crimes.  The pursuit of this understanding should be practiced fearlessly.  I suspect true understanding of what brings the mostly male perpetrators of the worst crimes to these behaviors is not pursued because of the threat its exposure could pose to dearly held values about masculinity and power*.  It could also implicate social structures that are in need of restructuring and obstacles to success that are in need of removal.  What if violent random crime could demonstrably be reduced by increasing advantages to the most desperate, or by ensuring returning veterans get proper support and treatment for PTSD, or by sensible regulation of gun sales?  We have somehow "decided" as a nation that "killing the irredeemable" is worth it in hopes that others may be deterred by it; can we not decide that understanding why such crimes occur in hopes of preventing them is as worthy of pursuit?  I propose that part of a life sentence should be mandatory subjection of the convicted to ongoing research that is well designed and peer reviewed by accredited experts in a broad range of fields, from criminology to various disciplines of psychology to jurisprudence to sociology, and that this research be made available for pubic policy discussion.  To my first point, a remorseful and reformed subject would be an asset to any such investigation.

I'll grant you that my notions of justice may not be to everyone's taste.  I imagine the spectrum of opinions on what justice is for those who might still believe in it run from eye-for-an-eye vengeance, revenge and extraction of satisfaction from the corpses of those deemed to be society's enemies to pie-in-the-sky pleasing notions of rehabilitation and redemption in this lifetime for all, especially for those most in want of it.  I've also lived long enough to know that social idealism has been declared an enemy of our corporate hierarchy and has taken a tarnishing from public relations firms and think tanks (and often from ourselves via lessons we've absorbed from the masters), so chances are if you've made it this far you're fighting a smirk for each mention of the word ideal.  I myself can hardly imagine America returning to a state in which policy is enacted and executed toward an end of improvement of both society and of the lots of people in it, no matter how demonstrably low they may have fallen or how far from adequately cared for they've been from the start.

I wish I had a "however" to follow that sentence with.  Instead, I admit my belief in the prospects for sane constructive justice procedures and a penal system that does more than make money for corporate profiteers or exact revenge regardless of the quality of the verdict or the effectiveness of the act as a deterrent is dim.   But it's not yet illegal to hope for something better.

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* Did I mention the unusually small penis?