House of Eratosthenes

Republican campaign managers, if you don’t get some juice out of this next year and things turn out as bad as all the talking-heads are predicting, you should seriously consider a different line of work.

The day after Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan jettisoned his case against a man accused of gunning down five teenagers last summer — which his office blamed on the disappearance of the sole witness — the New Orleans Police Department homicide unit announced they had located the woman in a matter of hours.

The dropped case also provoked a sharp rebuke from Mayor Ray Nagin, who issued a scathing written statement about the case, calling it part of a “disturbing pattern” of Jordan failing to even ask for assistance from other law enforcement agencies.

“This pattern from the District Attorney’s office is unacceptable and must improve immediately or I will ask the Attorney General to conduct a full investigation into this office,” said Nagin in an unusually pointed criticism of another elected official.

I have often heard it said the public must remain vigilant in making sure all levels of government safeguard and respect something called “our civil liberties.” I agree. Governments have a propensity for offering dilatory support to the rights of the individuals they govern, and then to embark on a slippery slope, ending with outright oppression against the citizens in whose name they rule. History shows all forms of government to be sneaky about this; sometimes, amazingly so.

But history shows we should be vigilant in safeguarding something else: Justice. The United States government, and by that I mean the “big” one — not the feds, but all levels of government in this country — has shown itself distastefully receptive to a disturbing school of thought that says: “Fairness” is measured by keeping everyone out of jail, not by putting people in who might belong there. Once you’ve collared a genuinely dangerous bad guy, go ahead and throw the fish back. You’re doing alright, as long as you don’t send innocent people to jail. You can release guilty guy after guilty guy after guilty guy, for any reason at all, and your system is still “fair” and surely your electorate will be honor-bound to regard you that way.

I mean, they have to, right? William Blackstone himself, author of much of the analysis of the British legal system upon which our own Constitution was based, said in a quote commonly misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.”

Well, it seems he did say it. But through the centuries, I maintain this has been interpreted as incorrectly as it has been credited. We have this unfortunate tendency to view this dictum as a release from any culpability in failing to prosecute guilty people. It was never intended to be taken as “hey, releasing guilty people, nothing wrong with that.” I know of no evidence anywhere, that would suggest William Blackstone thought it was cool to dream up brand-new creative ways to let guilty people go, year after year. But for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained to me, this is exactly what we end up doing. A good reason for letting a guilty man out of custody in the 1980’s, worked fine in the 1990’s but might have been a little bit tired by then…like tube socks or big hair. So with a new decade, we need new fashions and new reasons to let dangerous killers out of jail. With another new decade, we need more reasons still. We don’t demand justice, we demand imagination in inventing new rationales for letting criminals go. Through the decades since World War II, we’ve shown ourselves to be remarkably energetic and creative about it.

Nor have I — funny old bird that I am — ever thought of this as an absolute. Better than one innocent suffer? Suffer from what? Better that ten guilty persons escape? Guilty of what?

Could you take this to mean it’s better to release ten homicidal pedophiles, each of whom have solidly promised to re-offend as many times as they possibly can, than to allow an innocent person to be interrogated? Or to spend a single night in the hoosegow? I do not know if that is what Blackstone meant. I doubt it. But again, that is very close to the interpretation we have come to apply over the years. Justice is to be de-fanged, to the point that very few feel safe anymore, and that the few among us who can be blissfully unconcerned about violent crime, are limited to those who live in better-than-average neighborhoods. So that we can be secure in our “constitutional rights.” Except…people make a grand show about their insecurities in those too.

And here’s another pet peeve of mine: We don’t even call them constitutional rights anymore, because when you call them that you have to go look up the passage that is supposed to guarantee what you think you can convince someone you’ve been denied. That’s work. We don’t like to work when we bitch about things, we just like to bitch. So we call them “civil liberties” instead…it’s easier to use that as a lazy figure of speech. You want to bellyache but you don’t want to do any homework and mount a concrete argument, about how you were previously guaranteed something that has not been forthcoming, or that has been rescinded. So you call it a civil liberty. Poof. Problem solved. No work.

So for all the careful design all these hard-working, educated, cautious men did 220 years ago — most of us would sign on to the statement that they did a bang-up job, but not too many would agree it’s in great shape now. We’ve given up our ability and our responsibility to punish the guilty, so our “rights” would be safeguarded. Where’s the payoff? Those among us who have been most energetic about releasing murderers, are going to be the first to claim the rights are gone forever — and they’re going to blame George W. Bush, usually without even bothering to pretend to find the right that’s gone missing.

Wikipedia reports that in 2003 and 2004, the murder conviction rate in District Attorney Jordan’s jurisdiction was 12%, versus the national average of 80%. I can’t find a source for this. But the general flavor of what I can find, seems to settle the matter unambiguously: This boondoggle with the witness is the latest of many, and Jordan does suck, large.

Watch a movie made between 1970 and 1975. Pick one out at random. It’s probably a cop who refuses to play by the rules, gets yelled at by a Lieutenant with high blood pressure, is constantly involved in shootouts with “perps,” right? Why did we have a glut of such movies 35 years ago…it wasn’t just the next new hot thing after cowboy movies. We were sick to death of violent crime. We didn’t have faith in our justice system anymore. How did Republicans take over the White House, with a mediocre President who had such little “cred” with the younger generation — even before the Watergate scandal? What brought the unstoppable Camelot to an end?

It wasn’t a general malaise caused by Vietnam. It wasn’t bigots in the Deep South revolting after the Civil Rights Act. It was violent crime. If you were a young man with a low lottery number, you lost your freedom, but your transgression was to shoot liquor store clerks and disabled old people for thirty bucks in cash, you could keep it. The only question was what legal loophole was going to be used by your attorney to get you sprung. But it would almost certainly work.

We’re headed there again, I’m afraid. What an endless assortment we have of arcane legal maneuvering, procedural loopholes, District Attorney “oopsies,” and judicial fiats to get the guilty people out of jail and back on the streets. Nobody has bothered to keep up with this menagerie of piercings and flesh wounds and pinholes in our justice system…even though they’re all there.

I’m told we’re fed up with the War on Terror. The electorate is ready to pay more attention to domestic issues, and to vote on them. Well, here’s a big one.

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On Letting Guilty People Go FreeThursday, July 12th, 2007

On Letting Guilty People Go Free
Thursday, July 12th, 2007