American Politics Journal

Crime and Punishment, Revisited
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

Monday, May 7, 2001 (APJP) -- The other day, some guy who was convicted of foisting himself off as the golf player Tiger Woods in order to defraud Sacramento merchants was sentenced for the crime, which involved some $70,000 in fraudulent purchases, including a Lexus, some nice clothes, a watch...

...in fact just about everything except golf clubs!

The guy stood well over six feet tall and looked like he was crowding 300 pounds. Tiger Woods weighs about half that and is at least 15 years younger. I guess to some folks, all those (ahem) "darkies" really _do_ look alike, even though Tiger Woods himself ISN'T African-American.

It sounded like the sort of case in which the judge might hide a smile and order the guy to pay restitution and then spend 3-5 years in the joint to think over his little faux-pas.

But this is America in the 21st century, and the lunatics are running the asylum.

The judge sentenced the guy to -- I'm not making this up -- 200 to life.

That's no typo.

The judge, with a perfectly straight face, sentenced the guy to two hundred years to life, which presumably means a life sentence, but eligible to get out after two centuries IF he keeps his nose clean.

Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson was just settling in for his first term as President, having assumed office a little over a month earlier. Two hundred years is a fair stretch of time.

It's not the first such case. A guy got 25 to life for stealing a slice of pizza in Fresno a couple of years back. You'd expect to read about things like that in novels by Russian authors who are constantly pissing off the government and spending lots of time in jail themselves.

The crackpottery extends well beyond insane retribution against petty criminals. A couple of months ago, a six year old was arrested, HANDCUFFED (!), and hauled away by the cops for making a "gun" out of folded-up paper and pointing it at a fellow student.

Kids don't kill kids. Kids with wadded-up pieces of foolscap kill kids.

60 Minutes recently featured a case where some poor psychotic lost it and killed someone back in 1985, and a jury sentenced him to death. The Supreme Court ruled that it's unconstitutional to execute the mentally ill and the incompetent, and this particular prisoner was of the opinion that his upcoming execution was no big deal -- because the state had already executed him dozens of times before! A psychiatrist examined the guy, and concluded that he was, to use the proper medical parlance, crazier than a shithouse rat, and declared him incompetent.

Well, the law, in its infinite majesty, doesn't care if you were competent at the time of your crime. It doesn't matter if you killed someone because you believed he was Satan and controlling your mind through your dog. All that matters is that the guy is competent to be executed for his crime, even if the circumstances under which he committed it no longer make any sense to him. When it comes to bull-goose loony nuttery, Franz Kafka himself can't top the American justice system.

So the State of Arizona, where this all took place, thereupon had to get the guy medicated to the point he would become well enough to understand that he was going to die, and then they could kill him. If you ignore the fact that it's an absolutely insane stance, it seems simple enough. So they ordered the psychiatrist to dope the guy up on anti- psychotics so he, too, could appreciate the finer nuances of American justice.

That he might be in a better position, unmedicated, to empathize with the legal system is an irony that seems to have escaped our grim-faced "guardians of public morality" in Arizona.

So they ordered the psychiatrist to nuke the guy into sanity, and the psychiatrist refused on the grounds that it's unethical to treat patients for the sole purpose of killing them.

It's possible that Hannibal Lecter might disagree with that premise. It's certain that the State of Arizona did. They went shopping for a new shrink.

They contacted nearly every practicing psychiatrist in the whole state. No takers. They put ads in the paper. No takers. They advertised in other states. No takers. Say what you will about the sanity of psychiatrists -- this incident shows that they are a remarkably uniformly ethical group of medical practitioners. The State of Arizona, in its damp lust to get this guy declared sane so they could kill him, contacted thousands of psychiatrists, and even psychiatric LVNs.

Well, if you dig far enough, you'll eventually hit a sewer line -- and Arizona found their line in some private prison company in the Deep South which was perfectly willing to send its pet shrink to Arizona to evaluate the guy. This whore (go ahead, Doc, sue me) spent a half hour with the prisoner, and declared him gloriously, wonderfully sane, and thus eligible for a state-paid ride on the State of Arizona sunset special.

Under the law, you only need one state-certified shrink to declare the prisoner competent.

It'll go to the Supreme Court in the next week or so, but keep in mind that this is a sleazy excuse of a court dominated by Federalist Society trash who recently held that doing a recount of votes would damage their candidate irretrievably (it would have, too: he would have lost) and stopped the count; that cops have the right to arrest anyone and hold them for up to 36 hours on the tiniest of infractions; and that there is no longer any redress of grievances based on discrimination allowed against the states -- which includes cops and town officials, who might just decide to bring back Jim Crow laws.

Don't waste time expecting rational, humane, or just decisions from this "court" -- the majority don't have it in them.

America has a higher percentage of its population in jail than any large nation on earth -- and more than China and Russia combined in sheer numbers.

Why do we have such a despicable and lunatic system?

When did the blind urge to punish supplant the simple will to see justice?

Part of it is a crazed system in which judges have to answer to the electorate for their decisions, and more and more, legislatures are removing judicial discretion from sentencing. Judges are forced by law to hand down idiotic punishments imposed by a blindly vindictive society. Our prosecutors strut and posture for the cameras, just as any political animal will, because they are political animals, usually already considering runs for higher office. They want notches on their guns, scalps dangling from their belts. Some of them aren't real fussy about how they get them. Defense attorneys are deliberately underfunded, since providing decent defense to the accused has become synonymous with "coddling criminals". Certainly, it's a good way to get all those Tiger Woods "look-alikes" out of the way.

But that's only a part of it.

This is a frightened society. We like to blame crime, and guns, and violence -- but in fact, those have been steadily declining for 15 years.

The fact of the matter is that we fear what we are becoming. We feel terror that stems from free-floating anxiety as our standard of living diminishes, our children grow sicker under leaden skies, and we watch helplessly as Fascists stage a bloodless coup against our country -- and rather than face what bothers us squarely, we fight terror with terror. We fight oppression and fascism by becoming oppressors and fascists ourselves, and our accused, the helpless and reviled, make a good target.

We hand grifters sentences of 200 to life, not because we fear the grifters.

We fear ourselves.



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