Plea Deals and Public Executions
Not that long ago in our history, capital punishment was a popular tourist attraction. The hanging of felons behind the “county gaol” was sure to draw a crowd, and if it could be arranged on a summer evening or weekend, entire families with picnic baskets would show up to watch the bad guy twitch on the end of a rope. Seriously – I’m not kidding.
Just a hundred or so years before that, public pillories were in vogue. The offender would be trussed on a platform for all the “good” people to insult, strike, and pelt with all manner of foul and injurious objects.
And even as recently as Shakespearean times, disembowelment, drawing and quartering were still on the menu if you really, really, annoyed the sovereign. We’re only a few hundred years away from acting like ISIS, just a blink in the eye of history.
I could go on, but there may be children reading this. The point is that humankind has a taste for grisly punishment. We’re not content just to swat the fly, we need to smush the vile, hated abomination. It’s actually quite gratifying, guts and gore all over the windowpane. Take that!
Which brings me to plea deals in our criminal justice system.
Authoritarians of both the left and the right love to extol the virtues of “the full weight of the law”. Their adherents and toadies, both of the left and the right, cheer them on and demand the full, crushing weight of the state to annihilate the very memory of some poor SOB who dared sleep on a park bench in a “good neighbourhood”, utter a blasphemy, think a politically incorrect thought, or otherwise offend the tender sensibilities of better people. Make them behave like us, or get rid of them!
In more civilized justice systems we treat sentencing like fine art, nuanced in the hands of those who understand the physics of how these things must work. Judges, prosecutors, and defence counsel are well aware of precedential ranges of punishment for various offences, as well as the sorts of things which should aggravate or mitigate. And if a court of first instance gets it wrong, there are appeal courts to bring things back into line. As time goes on, it all gets fine tuned.
By and large, our system works. We have some violence, some fraud, some outlandish behaviour, but compared to most of the rest of the world, we really are pretty civilized.
But that doesn’t stop the boo birds who call for stiffer sentencing, less leniency, less discretion, more policing and more jails. Somehow by ratcheting up our tax bills for law enforcement we’ll be a better society.
As we survey Russia and China and Iran and Saudi Arabia, we see what it really looks like to have the Law and Order folks in charge. If you’re among the privileged elite, it’s actually pretty cool, but for the rest of us ordinary folk, not so much.
Our criminal justice system still believes that even the worst offender remains a citizen and a human being, and as such entitled to a fair trial, fair judgment, and proportionate consequences.
Plea deals are made on the trading floor of judicial commerce, a kind of marketplace of establishing value. Except in this case the values we negotiate are those of the lesson for the offender, the moral cost of the penalty to society, the value of the lesson for onlookers, the financial cost to us of the penalty for the rest of the offender’s lifetime, the deterrence factor, and the management of all of our primal instincts of vengeance, retribution, fear, and anger.
Plea deals are not namby-pamby kumbaya justice, they’re actual hard-nosed negotiations amongst seasoned professionals who deal with the reality of criminal justice day in and day out. They simply understand that they’re dealing with a lot of bad choices which they try to resolve into a few that are the least awful.
Plea deals aren’t perfect. Life isn’t perfect. But in the preferred civilized world of grownups, plea deals taken as a whole deliver as good a justice as our broken human race can muster at our stage of development.