Hate Crimes, Special Victims, and the Rest of Us

The new Defense Appropriations Bill either has been or is about to be signed into law, with an amendment that places people under federal protection from those who object to their sexual orientation. I’m certainly in favor of whatever it takes to prevent atrocities like the murder of Matthew Shephard. But I’m getting uncomfortable with statutes that protect only certain groups from crimes that we should all be protected from. I just did a quick run-through of the criminal section of the Illinois Compiled Statutes, and found something like 34 categories of people who are specifically protected from homicide, battery, assault, or hate crimes.

Specifically, that’s:
peace officers
correctional officers
minors
emergency medical technicians
persons over 60
disabled persons
teachers and school employees
unborn children
family or household members of the perpetrator
prison or jail inmates
park employees
caseworkers
bus or cab drivers
state or city employees on duty
sports officials and coaches
emergency management workers
utility workers
pregnant women
judges
merchants detaining shoplifting suspects
child athletes, and
people being victimized because of their
actual or
perceived
race
color
creed
religion
ancestry
gender
sexual orientation
physical or mental disability, or
national origin.

Of course, I’m not including any of the specifications about: who the perpetrator is, or where or when the crime is committed. I just want to know whose life is worth more than that of the average person on the street. (And never mind, for now, that assaulting or battering anybody on the street is, by reason of that fact, aggravated.)

Most jurisdictions have similar catalogs, so far as I can tell. Certainly federal law does. I spent some years as a federal law enforcement official protected by a statute that, I think, imposed a possible death sentence on anybody who murdered me. At the time, I was handling a case in a small local jurisdiction where the mayor had recently hired the killing of the City Attorney with whom my predecessor had been negotiating, so I kind of liked having that protection. But my point, obviously, is that every such jurisdiction (except the feds, who have no generalized murder, assault, and battery statutes) supposedly bans assault and battery against anybody. So why should we need these extra protections?

As to homicide, we really don’t. Homicide statutes get enforced fairly uniformly, except for informal special considerations for Important, or at least Nice, People, as opposed to street people, prostitutes, and prison inmates, and perhaps illegal immigrants—people whom many of us believe we would all be better off without.

But as to assault and battery, we really don’t bother. Illinois apparently doesn’t have any anti-bullying statute yet, but some other jurisdictions do. Bullying mostly involves juvenile-on-juvenile conduct that also clearly constitutes assault and battery. But most of us object to “criminalizing normal youthful hijinks,” even if they would already be criminal if the victim were an adult. Adult-on-adult “simple” assault or battery, unless the victim is within one of these protected classes, or the locus of the crime is a protected place, also gets ignored.

So we have to invent 34+ protected classes of victims and roughly the same number of protected locations to notify our police and prosecutors that “we really mean it” as to those persons and localities. Then we get objections from conservatives and more sinister forces that we are granting “special rights” to some groups at the expense of others. And, unfortunately, they’re right. Some people have special rights to be protected from assault, battery, and other unpleasantries, and the rest of us don’t.

That’s not (conservatives to the contrary notwithstanding) because we value some people more than others. It’s because we cannot be bothered to recognize a general human right to be safe from assault, battery, and other usually petty crimes. We put it into our statute books, but we almost never enforce it.

And that, in turn, is because our law enforcement system doesn’t want to be hauled into every petty dispute between ordinary people. Our police and judges have been all too well trained by their mothers: “I don’t care which of you hit the other one first.
Both of you shut up and sit still, or you don’t get any TV tonight.” “Nobody likes a tattletale.” In school bullying situations, all parties are likely to get the same punishment. This discourages reporting, which is just fine with the teachers. With children, or with unimportant people in general, the point of a disciplinary system is not to do justice, or even to inculcate good habits of behavior. It is to relieve the authorities of all but the most necessary work.

For my sins, I have had to spend a great deal of time representing a couple of people who are trying to direct the attention of the law enforcement system to various infractions committed by people near and formerly dear to them. Both the police and prosecutors have told my clients repeatedly that they have unlimited official discretion not to arrest or prosecute, regardless of the enormity of the offense in question. Most of this discretion doesn’t even make its way into the statutes or the reporting of court cases, because exercise of this discretion means, by definition, that there will never be a court case. This is, we are told, essential if we are not to expend most of our gross domestic product on law enforcement. Choices have to be made. Designation of special victims and crime circumstances are the way we make those choices.

At the same time (see http://wiredsisters.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/the-flabby-arm-of-the-law/), we keep the simple assault and battery statutes, and all sorts of other statutes we have no intention of enforcing, on the books. Thus we maintain the appearance of being Nice People, while not having to pay undue attention to the ordinary behavior of ordinary people, and at the same time holding a weapon in reserve for when that behavior arouses serious public emotion. Creation of one more class of protected victim is now the standard response to any horrendous crime. Many of the laws embodying this approach memorialize the names of victims, to keep the crimes fresh in our memory, so we will continue to consider them important—Megan’s law, Amber Alerts, and so on. No doubt the most recent addition to the federal hate crimes catalog will become known, at least informally, as Matthew’s law. Which is a worthy memorial to a young man who deserved a lot better of his society. But wouldn’t it be better to take seriously the rights of all of us to be free of assault, battery, and homicide?

Jane Grey

Miscellaneous Meanderings

There is, somewhere in one of “Official Rules” books, a Law which states, “Any organization founded to unite a proliferation of splinter groups invariably becomes one more splinter group.”  By the same token, any attempt to sum up everybody’s wide-ranging opinions on a particularly controversial subject invariably becomes yet another wide-ranging opinion.  But whattheheck, I’m going to try anyway.

There seem to be two repeating themes in the Gates-gate discussion:

 the police are entitled to be treated with respect or even deference, and are also entitled to use their power to enforce that right; anybody who mouths off to a cop deserves what s/he gets.
and
 there is a persistent disparity in the way different racial groups are treated by the law enforcement system, which cannot be completely explained by the behavior of those groups and their members.

These two propositions are not mutually inconsistent. They could both be true.  My sister Red appears to think that the former proposition is just plain dead wrong and is responsible (perhaps as part of a larger pattern of the male sense of entitlement and willingness to enforce it by the most direct means available) for a lot of serious violence between police and people of color.  I haven’t talked to Jane about this yet, but, being something of a statistical wonk, she probably accepts the latter proposition without boggling, and would be willing to go along with the former just for the sake of everybody getting along.

Everybody getting along is, in fact, a laudable goal.  When the major cause of death among the 16 – to – 35-year-old males of a particular group is homicide, mostly committed within that group (let’s leave the cops out of this for a moment), maybe the male sense of entitlement is a particular problem within that group.  As Jane would say, this needs more thought.

But, on the perennial other hand, unlike such cultural subgroups, the police are not “them.” They are “us.” They are acting in our name, on our behalf, and on our money. We cannot dismiss their behavior as “men will be boys.”  We cannot merely advise them to talk amongst themselves to come up with a better method for achieving their goals. Their goals, after all, are our goals.  They are doing the job we have assigned them to. If that job gets innocent people killed, that blood is on our hands.  We need to decide, as a society, whether we want the police to be able to protect the authority they wield in our name by arresting people, or worse, merely for transgressing social boundaries.  Maybe we do.  If so, the Constitution and the legal system we live by require that we put it in writing, and set written limits to the power we confer.

And, by the way, our mother always told us that “you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”  We have recently discovered that flies—at least the ones that frequent the Wired residence—like vinegar.  Haven’t tried them with honey yet, but this casts doubt on all the old verities.  As Jane would say, this needs more thought.

CynThesis

Nightline and the Devil

Last night, Nightline proclaimed that they would be airing a “great debate” over the existence of Satan. I really hope Ted Koppel was otherwise occupied, because what his successors broadcast bore no resemblance to Koppel’s various great debates and town meetings. If Koppel had done last night’s show, it would have featured Satan and God, or at the very least the Pope and Anton LaVey. Koppel would have advised the networks that the broadcast would be running over its usual time by at least an hour, and it would have actually included the entire debate.

Instead, we got slightly more than half an hour of mostly voice-over from the moderator summarizing whatever the participants said. And the participants were a bunch of second-stringers with not a serious theological brain among them.

Well, if you want to look up Rabbi Hirshfeld on Beliefnet, you can get a somewhat more literate treatment of the subject (though Hirshfeld attributes the bit about G-d fashioning good and forming evil to the Jewish liturgy of the good old days, rather than to the original source, Isaiah 45.)

Anyway, does Satan exist? For the earliest picture of his M.O., see the Book of Job, in which Satan is clearly one of G-d’s operatives. From the point of view of an occasional practicioner of criminal law, I find it easy to see the Satan of Job as an overzealous and sleazy prosecutor who is not above engaging in entrapment to keep up his win-lose stats. But I’m not sure I believe in this overblown Ken Starr wannabe. It was hard enough believing in the real one.

OTOH….yes there is evil in the world, and some of it really seems to have no rational explanation. Genocide, for instance, or child abuse. Or torture. It is easier to believe that such things are caused by diabolical possession than by elements that can be found in the nature of all human beings, from Mother Teresa to Adolf Eichman. If there is no devil, then all of us are capable of serious evil. Nightline not only missed that point, it trivialized the entire issue.

Jane Grey

Late Night with Obama

Last night, Mr. Wired and I watched the President on Jay Leno. We had been wondering why on earth he would bother appearing on a purely entertainment show. Later, it hit me—I don’t normally watch Jay Leno (sometimes Nightline, more often the History Channel or NatGeo), and for that matter I don’t usually watch presidential broadcasts either. But this unlikely combination drew me into doing two things I don’t normally do. This is obviously a productive strategy for both Obama and Leno.

Obama did a pretty good job guesting—it would be interesting to know if he wrote his own material. And Leno had a really good serious question: should we be making federal tax policy by slapping a tax on anybody we suddenly don’t like? Obama didn’t exactly respond to it, but it was obvious this wasn’t the first time the issue had come up. My own feeling is that the hoopla about the AIG bonuses is populism on the cheap—a way of turning a substantive issue of public policy into an emotional safety valve for a lot of people angry at losing their jobs and going broke. It has been officially sanctioned by the media as something it’s okay to get angry about, that doesn’t require any serious thought. Fortunately it’s not likely to generate any real lynchings.

Jane Grey

Scandinavian Spirituality, the Bible Belt, and the Culture of Pain

Conservatives are fond of branding modern liberalism a “culture of death,” because of its lack of objections to contraception, abortion and assisted suicide. For some reason, endorsement of war, the death penalty, and ready availability of firearms do not, in their eyes, have anything to do with “death.” This is an old argument, and I really don’t want to rehash it at the moment. What I do want to look at is the difference between the US Bible Belt and Scandinavia. Apparently they are polar opposites, not only in their level of religious observance and belief, but also in what one might call their lifestyle statistics: levels of violent crime (lots of it in the Bible Belt, almost none in Scandinavia), divorce, illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, domestic abuse, you get the picture. Scandinavians, apparently, are Nice People, and Bible Belters—well, not so much.

If you assume, as I think most Americans of whatever faith do, that the main purpose and value of religion is to make people be Nice, these figures are counterintuitive. But this view of religion is also not quite consistent with classical Christian theology. You should maybe check out Newman’s description of the gentleman in Idea of a University. The gentleman is, above all, Nice. “It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain.” But he falls far short of Christian sanctity.

Some religious leftists, like me, take uncharitable delight in the inconsistencies of Bible Belt morality. It is fun to point out that Texas has a much higher divorce rate than Massachusetts. It is even fun to point out that the way we can tell that Joe Lieberman isn’t a real Democrat is that he has been divorced. If the Pope were a Republican, divorce would be the 8^th sacrament. (No no, bad liberal, go to your room. Really uncharitable.)

But there are several ways to look at this discrepancy. One is a teaching I think I picked up from the Jewish philosopher and physician Maimonides: the soul recognizes its own defects and chooses the appropriate remedies for them. Thus, most pacifists I know have really nasty tempers. Anarchists and libertarians tend in general to be bossy. And Quakers, whose primary liturgical expression is silence, are some of the talkiest people on the planet. One can view these inconsistencies as expressions of hypocrisy, or as conscious or unconscious efforts to remedy one’s besetting sins. Maybe Bible Belters are stricter in their ideals of sexual propriety precisely because they tend to be more passionate in their personal lives. They still have “dry” counties because they tend to be heavy drinkers. You get the idea.

Another way to look at this discrepancy is developmentally. The Scandinavians were not always Nice. Indeed, they started out as the Vikings, as nasty a bunch of thugs as you would ever not want to meet in a dark alley. (Four hundred or so years later, the Swiss were maintaining their Gross National Product as mercenary soldiers, with a very similar reputation. Now, of course, the Swiss are Nice, too. And then there were the New England gentry, most of whom were dope dealers to the Orient in their heyday.) Maybe every nation or eth has to go through a thug phase before becoming Nice. In the long run, there’s hope for all of us.

Or maybe, as Newman suggests, Nice is not what religion—Christian religion, anyway– is really all about. If we are fallen creatures, it doesn’t even matter how Nice we are, we are still sinners and the remedy for sin isn’t Niceness, it’s forgiveness. For further illumination of this view, read the Left Behind series. The Antichrist starts out as a Nice Person, almost a true gentleman in Newman’s sense of the word. He’s in favor of world peace and prosperity and other good things. That’s how (in the view of the authors) we know he’s the Antichrist. (But of course, the only way the authors can persuade their readers that he is the Antichrist is to portray him doing a lot of really un-Nice things as the novels proceed, like beheading Chloe. The author of Revelation has the same problem, and solves it the same way. Theologians may think Niceness is the work of the devil, but the rest of us still prefer it.)

That is not a mainstream Jewish position, and it sure as hell isn’t a mainstream liberal position. We Jews are primarily concerned with Niceness. For that reason, we lack the Christian obsession with doing the right thing only for the right reason. We are perfectly okay with doing the right thing for the wrong reason, because it is still better to live in a world where the right thing is being done, for whatever reason, than not. But then, we don’t view human beings as fallen, either. Prone to screw up, yes. Fallen, inherently sinful, no.

And, more to the point, unlike the followers of classical Christianity, we Jews do not worship pain. We have devised ways to handle it, and live with it, and even use unavoidable pain for good purposes where necessary. But we still prefer, and work to achieve, Niceness. We believe that suffering does not necessarily ennoble the spirit. So, for instance, most of us recognize that overpopulation leads to suffering, and that, of the possible ways to reduce overpopulation, abortion, enforced celibacy, and famine produce more suffering than contraception. So we endorse contraception. But most of us also believe that, at least in the early embryonic stages, the unborn child is not subject to suffering, and therefore that early-stage abortion is preferable to the other remaining alternatives.

And, apparently, the stats back us up. Societies that have reduced suffering have also produced Nicer people. Or, as Al Capp’s Mammy Yokum said long ago, “Good is better than evil because it’s nicer.”

Jane Grey

Anguished Rant

The Jewish hostages in Mumbai are dead. They include a young rabbi and his wife, who are the parents of a two-year-old who got out safely and is now with his grandparents. It seems to be clear that the murders have been done by a group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen. Can we finally stop dodging the fact that Islamic terrorists are not merely anti-Zionist but anti-Jewish? I mean, when they’re willing to go all the way to Mumbai to find Jews….? I find it annoying that the US media keeps referring to the Chabad group that sponsored the rabbi as “ultra-orthodox,” partly because anybody who actually knows anything about orthodox Judaism knows that Chabad is pretty much in the middle, as orthodoxy goes, but mostly because that seems to be a way to trivialize or even excuse their victimization—they’re not real Jews, or for that matter real people, just a bunch of fanatics getting knocked off by another bunch of fanatics.BBC seems to be implying that a counter-attack against the D. M. by Mossad advisers to the Indian army can be expected any minute now, as if to suggest that India is getting what it deserves by having treated Israel pretty much the way it treats any other nation. At the moment, I hope the Indian army is getting help from the Israelis—this is the kind of stuff the Israelis are highly competent at dealing with, and anybody in this kind of mess would have to be crazy not to consult them. Aside from which, if the terrorists are going to blame India for having normal relations with Israel, the Indians might as well at least get the benefits of what they’ve already paid for.

A couple of centuries ago, more or less, the first Zionists envisioned a Jewish state as the solution to the problem of anti-Semitism. Now, apparently, the state has become a focus of anti-Semitism, and a justification for it. Of course the Middle East has always been one of the most volatile pieces of real estate on the globe, and maybe the first Zionists should have looked elsewhere to set up their state—I dunno, maybe the Falkland Islands, site of the world’s worst weather? But even if they had gone to Antarctica, I am willing to be that the Penguin Liberation Front would be parading out in front of some Israeli consulate somewhere even as we speak.

Maybe they should just pave over the whole Middle East and turn it into a parking lot for Cyprus? Or move the Dalai Lama in to run the place—oh, I forgot, he’s thinking of retiring or dying or whatever, and besides, that would just pull the Chinese into the picture, G-d forbid.

Normally, I very strongly disbelieve in devils and demons and possession and all that stuff. But sometimes I think demonic possession is the only explanation for the extraordinary evil people occasionally do. Ruanda. The Congo. Darfur. The former Yugoslavia. The Middle East. On one hand, I am thankful that the US seems to have transcended its racial history in this year’s election. That’s my major Thanksgiving thank-You. But on the other hand….

CynThesis

No Time for Party Politics II

I just got a call from a friend of mine who just got back from the Vets for Peace convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul, and told me about the numerous police raids on the homes of members of groups planning demonstrations against the Republican National Convention. This was the first I’d heard, and there hasn’t been anything conspicuous in the Chicago papers about it. Nothing on NPR, at least while I was listening this morning. After talking to my friend, I googled “RNC police raids” and pulled up a bunch of interesting stuff, such as:

http://www.startribune.com/politics/27695244.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/08/30/police-raid-headquarters-of-rnc-protesters/

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/08/30/more_raids/?refid=0

and our own closely related:

http://tpzoo.wordpress.com/2008/08/31/silence-from-the-press-about-rnc-police-raids-and-from-the-po

as well as:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/09/amy-goodman-arr.html

and:

http://www.minnesotaindependent.com/6416/slide-show-sundays-veterans-for-peace-march

Apparently the blogosphere is the last refuge of the free press. I plan to forward some of this stuff to the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and the Defender, just to embarrass them. Back to work.

Red Emma

Eyes on the Street

 

 

These days, video cameras are everywhere. They no longer even depend on the whim of individuals fooling around with their toys, like the guy who accidentally taped Rodney King being beaten up.  Cameras are permanently set up all over the place.  ATMs, building entrances, lobbies, banks, intersections, virtually anyplace capable of supporting the negligible weight of today’s video cameras.

 

Some people, lamenting the loss of privacy, find this unsettling.  I yield to no one in my fervor for civil liberties. But I like the omnipresence of video cameras.  Whose privacy do they violate?  If you leave the four walls of your own home, place of worship, meeting room, or romantic tryst site, you have no expectation of privacy.  If you want privacy, stay home.  Or at least pay cash.  I think I might feel differently if the cameras also recorded audio. Fortunately, given the ambient noise level of the great urban outdoors, that would be wasted effort anyway.  So if, in the course of a conversation with a friend as we walk down the street, or sit in a restaurant, or ride a bus, I malign the president or the war, I don’t expect to be electronically overheard.

 

But if somebody zooms through a red light and gets caught on camera, three cheers!  If somebody robs me at an ATM, his face is preserved for posterity, and that’s just fine.  If I have to walk through a questionable neighborhood on the way to my car, I’m comforted by the knowledge that somebody somewhere is monitoring my progress and my safety.

 

Yes, I have been somewhat spooked by police taking pictures at anti-war demonstrations.  The proper response, which seems to have been picked up quickly, is to take pictures of the cops in return.  Both can be useful in court later, especially as proof of what didn’t happen.  I’ve already gotten one client acquitted on 6 felony charges, based on such a video.

 

The down side of the ever-present security cameras isn’t that they erode privacy. The real down side is that they are a symbol of the end of visual community, what Jane Jacobs used to call “eyes on the street.”  By which she meant, not electronic doohickeys, but real live people with the time to watch what went on around them and the inclination to respond appropriately to it or testify about it as necessary.  Jacobs located such people on front porches and similar semi-public places.  Front porches are mostly unoccupied these days.  The people who used to hang out there are much more likely to be at work, if they are able-bodied enough to be useful as witnesses.   Or, in really dangerous neighborhoods, they are inside, with the shades down, unwilling to be seen, and especially unwilling to be seen seeing any illegal act.  So, on one hand, it is sad that we need an electronic replacement for such human vigilance. On the other hand, it is good that we have one.

 

Jane Grey