The Supreme Court has made it a tad easier to send people to death row by ruling that people that object to the death penalty when there is a Life Without Possibility of Parole option can be disqualified from serving. The concern is that once you remove those people from the jury pool, you’re not only more likely to get a jury that will execute (which would be the goal) but you’re likely to get a jury that is more predisposed to find the defendant guilty.

Several years ago I was a death penalty opponent that was a candidate for a capital crime jury.

It was shortly before I left Colosse for Deseret and the whole process lasted longer than the eventual trial did. I was unemployed and really had nothing better to do than go to the county courthouse and spent a day or two listening to some traffic complaint. When my number was called out along with 119 others and I was given a packet of 160 questions I figured that this might not be some piddly traffic violation. Particularly when it started asking about my views on the death penalty, my political affiliations, any “radical” organizations I belong to, opposition to government actions, opposition to law enforcement behavior, and so on and so on. By the time I was done I knew it was the real deal. I also figured that there was no way in the world I would get on that jury because I put down clear as day that I am against the death penalty.

It turns out that it’s not quite that simple. There are some idiosyncrasies in Delosian law wherein the jury does not actually sentence someone to die. Rather they answer four or five questions about whether or not a particular murder meets the minimum requirements for the death penalty to be applied (was the murder an attempt at covering up or evading arrest for another crime, is the person a threat to human life in the future, and a couple other things along those lines, is there any mitigating reason why this particular defendant should be spared the death penalty). If any two of the five are int he affirmative and if the death penalty is being sought, the convicted goes to death row.

Had the question been put any other way I almost certainly would have had to recuse myself from the jury. I could not, in good conscience, tell a judge to have a prison guard kill a person. But my mind draws a clear distinction between that and answering the questions that I was asked. The only question that went to the heart of moral feelings about the death penalty was the one about mitigating circumstances. Truth be told, though, if we’re going to have a death penalty it should be as fairly applied as possible. As such it would not be fair of me say that there were mitigating circumstances when there weren’t. So despite my opposition to capital punishment, I was good to go.

What followed afterwards was a pointed attempt by the prosecution to demonstrate that I was not, in fact, good to go at all. I got a battery of extremely harsh questions. The prosecution tried paint me as a lilly-livered bleading heart, an American-hating peacenik (the questionnaire had asked if I had opposed any American military action in my lifetime, which I had), and an anarchist. After he was done to me, the defense attorney got up and asked if I had a problem with people with long hair. I answered in the negative and he was done with me.

The prosecution was trying to get the judge to disqualify me as prejudicial without having to waste a strike on me. The goal I think was to rattle me or maybe get me to indicate that I really didn’t like the prosecution (or prosecutors in general). But I never rattled. The closest I got was when he likened the “war on crime” to an actual war overseas and I was sorely tempted to say something to the effect of “If this is war then why are we wasting our time on trials?” I bit my tongue, though. He had succeeded in getting me to not like him, but at some point I realized that the biggest way I could be a pain in his arse was to force him to use a strike on me.

As luck would have it, the judge absolutely loved me. I’m really not sure why considering that the first thing he learned about me was that I was a softy on capital crimes (he wasn’t). In any case, either he really wanted to keep me around or I convinced him pretty thoroughly that I could be impartial. but he shot down all the prosecution’s objections.

The outcome was never in doubt. Colosse County is pretty Republican (even if the city isn’t) and a hotbed of law and order conservatism. I was an outlier and surely the prosecution had enough strikes to kick by bum to the curb. There was no doubt that the guy did it along with a number of other awful things and I didn’t figure that the jury would have any problem sending him to his chemical death. Sure enough, just a few weeks after I was shown the door he was sentenced to death.

Doing a quick google, he has apparently found Jesus and taken to writing poetry (in English and German) as he awaits execution.

A CNN story comes up today that almost made me sick to my stomach. Not because of anything visual, but more with rage.

Due to content, the rest of this post will be in-link only, rather than right on the main page.
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There’s an interesting one going around the web today, about a guy up in Cheddarland (Oconomowakkawakka) who busted down his neighbor’s door over a porn video.

Things against the guy:
– He lives without a phone. With his elderly mom. Creepy.
– He busted in with a sword. Not a baseball bat, not something normal, no, a civil war heirloom cavalry sword. Creepy.
– He “froze” and “freezing”, instead of not doing anything, consisted of scaring the ever-loving daylights out of his neighbor. Bad choice of words.

Things in favor of this guy:
– The neighbor admits to the cause.
– The neighbor admits to having the volume turned up way too loud.
– The neighbor watches some really messed up porn. In an apartment. With the volume blaring really loud.

Were I the police? I’d have to weigh how things were. And I’d probably conclude that this guy ought to be let off the hook, because he had probable cause to believe that someone was in danger right then and there. Calling 911? Good option, but by the time the police were there, if there were a rapist the girl could be dead.

And I’m hoping a jury will find the same, or maybe a grand jury or more sane prosecutor will just let this one pass.

Fascinating, if true:

Inmates in state prisons are dying at an average yearly rate of 250 per 100,000, according to the latest figures reported to the Justice Department by state prison officials. By comparison, the overall population of people between age 15 and 64 is dying at a rate of 308 a year.

White and Hispanic prisoners are dying at slightly higher rates in prison, but blacks more than compensate.

I’d guess that there are three factors at play here:

1. Three hots and a cot. I’d imagine prison food isn’t the most healthy, but it’s probably more balanced than what a lot of people get outside prison.
2. Free health care.
3. Barriers to drug use and reckless behavior. Only 2% die from alcohol, drugs, or accidental injuries.

These numbers are despite a whopping 8% of deaths being due to homicide or suicide.

In an article entitled “The Irrational 18-Year-Old Criminal,” Joel Waldfogel explains that the latest research indicates that the threat of prison time does not deter criminals.

Maybe the 18 year old criminals aren’t so irrational after all…

I’m not easily stunned by the news of the day, but this one did it for me. A Sheriff’s Deputy was released for prison after one year for murdering a suspect that was handcuffed and laying on the ground

Given the circumstances (the suspect had just killed the cop’s partner), I can certainly understand taking a pass on first degree murder. It obviously wasn’t premeditated and the cop was under a great deal of stress. I can understand a light sentence. But one year? For killing an already neutralized threat? And apparently the only reason he spent a year in jail was that he used a firearm to do it. If he’d just found a pick-axe he might have gotten off on probation.

The world will absolutely not miss the guy that was killed. But we have a criminal justice department for a reason. I honestly wish the guy weren’t handcuffed or that it wasn’t caught on tape so that there were some credible excuse for what happened. But the guy wasn’t and it was. The system should behave accordingly.

Ron Washington, my home city of Colosse’s most recent former mayor, was a police commissioner of Colosse and a handful of other cities before getting elected. When he was first elected in the late 90’s, I remember thinking it odd that he only had support of one of the city’s two police unions and that endorsement took a lot of behind-the-scenes work by a local state senator. The support that he did receive was tepid at best and they declined to support his re-election bid.

As it turned out, Washington was a startlingly poor mayor. When he was re-elected the only rationale his supporters could offer up was that he was too incompetent to be corrupt (which was true, though since he was term-limited out, a couple of his former aides are now in jail). I remember thinking at the time that you would think that cops would support a commissioner-candidate because his cop background would make him more likely to consider faults in the department (such as cop pay and resources) a priority. After became obvious what a bumbling fool Washington was, I figured that the union had some insight into the mayoral candidate that the rest of us lacked.

But I stumbled across something interesting the other day.

Mike Moakley is Colosse’s current commissioner and the article I ran across was on the site of a police union of Sierra City, where Moakley was chief before moving to Colosse. It was pointing out Colosse’s rising crime and how Moakley’s top priorities are not particularly aimed at correcting this problem (upping grooming requirements, cutting down on high speed chases). I found it odd that the Sierra City cop union would take up web space denouncing a former chief and not so subtly saying his new employer should push him out the door.

That got me thinking that often the people that worked under you, regardless of how well you performed, may actually be the least likely to support you once you are no longer their boss. I would be reluctant to vote for many, probably most, of the company heads I’ve worked for. You get to know them a little too well and you’ve often suffered for their mismanagement. This is probably particularly true for something like a police chief, whose job is not to support the police officers but rather the mayor.

I was listening to NPR the other day and they were talking about Pellican Bay, one of the toughest prisons in the country. Inmates there can literally go weeks without seeing another living person. One person interviewed said that he had not seen a woman in fourteen years. One in ten inmates will end up in the psychiatric shoe of the building.

Pellican Bay is reserved for the worst offenders. It does not, however, delineate based on what offense landed them in prison. Rather it is there for the most uncontrollable cases inside prison, meaning that you could get caught selling pot, run in with some bad folks in jail, and end up in relatively permanent isolation.

I understand why these prisons exist and the function they serve. There are a lot of folks that you have to separate from everyone else. And unlike regular prison, it’s nigh impossible to land there by the mistake of a false conviction. It costs the state $50,000 per year to house them there, it’s not a decision they are likely to make easily.

What bothers me most about the set-up is that, because it is not related to whatever crime landed the inmates in prison to begin with, it is not reserved for those with life sentences and the people that end up in these prisons in many cases will rejoin with society. People who spent five years without even irregular human contact will be joining those on the outside whenever their time is up. One of the people they interviewed was due to be released in a couple of years.

I’m not sure I can think of a better way to train a sociopath. I mean, I guess theoretically it would serve as a deterrant because they wouldn’t go back (assuming that marbles weren’t lost in the process), but even with that logic they can commit crimes and not go back to Pellican Bay. All they would have to do is behave wherever they originally land, which after having served in Pellican Bay, is bound to be a cakewalk.

When I was a freshly minted driver at the age of 16, one of the things I was sure would get me would be something like failing to turn my lights on half-an-hour before sunfall (because, I suspected, they had cops with watches that counted down and were waiting to get unsuspecting travellers such as myself.) I also worried about the hundred thousand little things, such as a busted headlight or lapsed registration or insurance.

My father, seeking to ease my concerns, told me that while I definitely need to worry about insurance, the other things can actually be a blessing as much as a curse. Often, he told me, a police officer that pulls you over for speeding will opt to give you a non-moving violation that won’t go on your record over a speeding ticket or run stop-sign that would.

I kept that in mind earlier this year when I decided not to renew the registration on my car. I figure that I’m only going to be here for a few more months so half of the registration expense would be wasted. I could keep the registration in Estacado, of course, but cops often target out-of-state plates and I wouldn’t want to leave myself vulnerable for that. And, I reasoned, if I got pulled over it might get me out of a ticket.

Clancy and I were high-tailing it for Capitol City this weekend when I happened upon a Deseret State Trooper. I was going about 15mph over, which is more than the usual 5-10mph grace space I give myself when I flout the law in the name of trying to “make up time in the air” to get somewhere on time. Clancy, who was napping, woke up to the sound of my exclaiming, “Holy cow poop!” I slowed down of course and changed lanes, but there was little doubt as to what awoke the officer from his restful spot on the emergency crossover.

Now, for all my criticisms of Deseret, one of the things I appreciate are the cops. I’ve had to call the cops a couple times and fill out a report or two and every time they’ve been what you think cops are supposed to be when you’re little. I was pulled over several months back and the cop was as nice as could be. Though I am always polite to officers when they pull me over, I was actually apologetic to this officer (and not in the way one regrets when one does not get out of a speeding ticket as hoped).

The highway patrolman that nabbed me was no different. He asked if I was from Delosa because he recognized the “Southern Tech Alumni” bumper sticker on my car. He told me that he pulled me over for my speed and asked me if I realized that I was going 87mph (note: speed limit was 75). I told him that I didn’t (I thought I was going 91 or so) but that I realized it once I saw him. I was sincerely sheepish and I think he appreciated what he thought was my honesty (and was, to an extent, I did not realize I was going over 85 until I looked down after I saw him).

He asked for my license and registration. I gave him my license and Clancy and I hunted for the registration. As expected, he noted that it was out of date and asked me if I had renewed it. I told him that I wasn’t sure, but that I probably hadn’t.

Sure enough, Dad’s plan worked. When he got back he gave me a ticket for the registration but not the speed. I was all proud of myself for this lesson that I had just learned.

Until I shared it with Willard. Willard informed me that when he was serving his mission in California, an escort of his had a car actually impounded for a lack of registration. That’s an awfully big risk to get out of a moving violation.

Then, of course, it hit me: one doesn’t have to have one’s registration expired to get a ticket for it. All one needs is to be unable to prove that the registration is current. The cop even said that if I had re-registered my car and forgotten about it. So the verdict is that I will have one outdated registration in my car to give the cops and a current one in case the cop is an prick about it.

Bob Krumm has a couple interesting posts on the subject of sex with minors (both minors and minors and adults and minors).

Mr. Krumm makes a good point about the parents in all this. I remember when I was in school I was quite frankly amazed at the lattitude a lot of my classmates had. Of course, my best friend Clint was amazed at the lattitude I had. In fact, I had more than did most of my friends, but far less than the average person my age (or so it seemed). It often seems that many of the same parents that dutifully speak and vote as though they are concerned with cultural sexual decadence often become complicit in enabling that sort of behavior.

On the other hand, as Chris Ware points out in the comment section, the fact that kids like to have sex is not news and not a product of poor parenting as much as it is biology. Giving kids the freedom to (covertly or overtly) experiment sexually, however, certainly does fall on the parents.

How much parents should hold their kids back sexually is a value judgment, though. A tough one, in my view. On the whole, we can only contain biology so much. Holding sex until after marriage was a considerably more realistic option for more people when you could expect to get married between 18-25. Mormons are able to pull it off in higher numbers in part because their sons are often off to their missions at 19 and then come back at 21 ready to settle down with the 18-19 year old young ladies getting out of high school. It’s as good a set-up as I can imagine provided that you want your kids to marry young.

Historically speaking, the fifteen and sixteen year olds that are having sex now aren’t remarkably young to be having sex. It just seems to me that we’ve pushed growing up so far back that (a) it seems to be unconscionably young because marriage is presumably so far off and (b) they are likely less emotionally and mentally equipped to handle what they may be ready for physically. Both tie together in my mind, though, because they are often less equipped to deal with sex because marriage seems to be so far off because we’ve moved the milestones so far out that they have not been charged with the responsibilities that are required for one to grow.

A lot of the vapidity we can see in youth today can be traced to, as much as anything else, boredom. Middle class kids with educated parents are generally smart enough that school requires less than three hours of brainpower a day. And most of school is (or seems to be at the time, for sure) just jumping through arbitrary hoops anyhow. Extracurricular activities also usually seem to revolve around socialization or around flexing physical or mental muscles for the arbitrary end of winning the game. We’ve recast recreational activities as responsibilities (often superceding the relatively minor academic responsibilities that do exist).

To put it in Reality TV terms, it’s the difference between Big Brother and Survivor. Survivor has its arbitrary rules and whatnot, but a lot of energy there is expended towards surviving and trying to get as comfortable as possible. Alliances are partially found and kept on ability and work ethic in addition to who likes whom. Big Brother, on the other hand, already starts out with the characters being reasonably comfortable and so twice the energy is devoted towards socialization. Who likes whom moves from being a factor to being the ultimate factor.

Due to a lot of factors, including what I believe is a failure to thoroughly challenge young people, kids spend more time thinking about what other kids think than they do anything else. The frivolous pursuit of social status that the parents must balance with financial, employment, and childrearing responsibilities exists in the lives of the younger ones without any appropriate counterbalance. It mostly serves to fill the vacuum left by not having to work on the farm, not having to learn a trade, and not having to devote a day’s work into making decent (if not great) grades.

And because of this vacuum, physical desires that may ordinarily be put off, suppressed, and ignored begin to flower at a time inconducive for it to. The ultimate problem, in my view, with teenage sex is that the kids are ill-equipped to deal with it emotionally and they are absolutely ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of it — pregnancy. With birth control, however, we’ve given the illusion that they will not have to deal with it because we have made it to where they most likely won’t. With this, we’ve taken what little external responsibility that comes with having sex out of their hands. Or at least we’ve given them that illusion. The dirty little secret about birth control is that it has probably caused more unwanted pregnancies than it has prevented in the same way that rugby is safer than football because it lacks the protective gear.

Let me state unequivocally that I am a fan of the existence of birth control and I’m not very much interested in a discussion over the morality of birth control or abortion in this forum. But I do think that the results have been more mixed than we often consider. The cat has been let out of the bag, though, and I don’t believe it can be shoved back in.

Regardless, though, it is another example where we’ve taken responsibility and power away from our young in favor of prolonging youth. It seems that much of the last half of the last century was spent carving out a holding tank for young people. The intent was to take responsibilities out of the way so that they could form in our formative years. What I believe we’ve missed is that by postponing real responsibility past the adolescent years, many of the attitudes are not being formed in a time of entitlement when many of their actions (or inactions) have no real consequences and reality is so warped around that reality, making them ill-equipped at age 14 (or sometimes even 24) to accept responsibilities when they unavoidably intrude.

I was, to say the least, not particularly popular in junior high. Fat and weird are a pretty bad combo in what is already a tough age period. I tried being tough and standing up for myself, but I wasn’t particularly convincing because by-and-large I could not fight back due to parental constraints. Trying to avoid them just goaded them on.

Eventually I discovered the secret: Bribe them.

Most of the bullies were not really the sharpest tools in the shed. Most of them struggled just to pass. By ‘struggle’ I mean beg, whine, complain, and do anything to cojole the teachers into giving them a grade they didn’t earn — for them, that was struggling. I think it started with Jack Knowles. Jack was pretty cold in our sixth-grade year, but in the seventh he sat next to me in a couple key classes. One day he had completely forgotten about a big assignment and was so desperate that he asked for my help. I doubt I was conniving enough to see the opportunity and I think I was just afraid to say no, so I gave him the answers.

It turns out that you don’t need to bribe all the tough kids. If you get one or two in your corner the rest will find someone else to pick on a la The Gator Theory. Of course, once they’ve found that they can lean on you they won’t stop using you. I’m not sure whether it’s the intelligence to see an opportunity or the stupidity that comes with a short memory, but a certain contingent of the bullies would befriend their enablers. Sometimes it was just a matter of passing along my homework, though sometimes I was doing homework for classes that I wasn’t even taking. Far from feeling abused, I actually felt appreciated. Before long I had placated a handful of former tormentors and even won a few friends. My yearbook is strewn with signatures and notes from Jack, other former tormentors, and friends I made through them.

High school was a vast improvement and I didn’t quite need the protection. I was getting taller and a less bulky and a high school of 4,000 allows for anonymity that a junior high of 900 does not. But saying “no” was less a strong point then than it is now (and it’s not exactly my strong point now) and I managed to work my way out of the cellar of the caste system by placating verbal abusers. In leiu of saying “no” to people I wanted to say “no” to, I started charging money. I never took World History in high school, but I knew m0re about Egyptian history than some of my clients that did. I had even developed methods of communications during tests.

I got caught once or twice and my grades suffered (though no disciplinary action was taken). That just served as justification to drive the price up higher for those that paid (by that point, most of the tormentors had fallen a grade or two behind me or been shipped off to the alternative school).

It’s interesting sometimes the moral blindspots we develop. In some ways the whole thing bolstered my contempt for public education. In a couple of cases I was caught dead-to-rights and nothing happened. The teachers were too worn out and apathetic to care. In that vein I can sort of understand why criminals continue to commit the same crimes and get tossed in to prison repeatedly. It’s not so much that I think prison life would be easy but that they are threatened with the moon and the stars and then given light sentences with moderate supervision afterwards. The criminal justice system just goes through the motions and eventually it just becomes a dance.

A dance.

I never needed the money the same way that I needed the protection. But it became apparent that few teachers really had the energy to care. It also seemed to me then (more than it does now) that the whole school system was a dance. Jump through this hoop and then the next one. It felt more like just doing sprints rather than actually playing ball. I didn’t realize then as I do now that those sprints pay off in the long run. My ability to jump through those hoops served more purpose than actually doing so.

If I feel guilty about anything, it’s about being an enabler for some of my clients. One of the bigger problems I have with public education as I experienced it was the inability or stubborn refusal to draw the line in the sand and fail kids that deserve to fail. I saw this firsthand in elementary school as I got 70 after 70 — it’s unlikely that I fell just on the right side of the pass/fail line so many times. It wasn’t until I got my first failing grade that I started to straighten up. The same system that coddled me also coddled my bullies. I suppose I could have drawn a line in the sand and told some of these people that they have to get their act together or they will fail because I wouldn’t help them.

But ultimately, what would have been the point?

It’s an easy trap to fall in to, to say to yourself that the world is so screwed up that no one will notice or care when you deviate from the line. Download illegal files, get a radar detector, take some juice so that you can measure up against your competitors that are all taking, and cheat in school and help others do so. When the data table is corrupt, it doesn’t matter what’s on the files, really.

It’s such a seductive argument that it can’t help but pervade my consciousness. It’s such a destructive argument that I really wish it didn’t.