Should Sentences Vary Depending On Why The Person Did It? Should Insanity Even Be A Defense?
Should a ghetto gang member get a lighter sentence than a middle-class criminal who had an opportunity to live a law-abiding life?
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
Should a poor criminal get a lesser sentence because s/he desperately needed the money?
Should alcoholics, psychopaths and insane people get a lesser sentence because their criminal acts were propelled by mental conditions beyond their control?
Those who think that the only reasons for imprisonment are to
- (1) punish the perpetrator for choosing to commit a bad act and
- (2) deter others from choosing to commit similar bad acts
believe that a criminal’s sentence should be proportional to the voluntariness of his/her criminal conduct.
The give-him-a-pass-because-he’s-a-victim-too advocates want to believe that we imprison people only to punish them for voluntarily committing a bad act and that therefore the less voluntary the criminal act, the less the punishment should be.
But that’s not true at all.
Why We Lock People Up
We imprison people who do “bad things” for four reasons not two:
To
- (1) punish the perpetrator for committing a bad act;
- (2) deter the perpetrator from committing more crimes in the future
- (3) deter others who might be inclined to commit a similar bad act
- (4) use isolation to protect society from the perpetrator
Each of these reasons standing alone justifies locking up the perpetrator.
Everyone Has An Excuse
From the criminal’s point of view there’s always a reason for leniency — bad upbringing, poverty, horrible neighborhood, low intelligence, poor impulse control, medical problems, drug or alcohol addiction, etc.
BTW, on the other end of the spectrum criminals ask for a lower sentence because they come from a good family, they are well educated and their promising future will be destroyed by a severe sentence, etc. Check out the reasons Elizabeth Holmes claimed entitled her to a shorter sentence.
The Sentence Needs To Serve The Needs Of Society Not The Needs Of The Criminal
BUT, from the victim’s point of view, whether the driver who ran them over was a hopeless alcoholic or a law-abiding, usually-sober, citizen is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter to the pedestrian lying bleeding in the gutter or to the thousands of other pedestrians who walk those same streets why the perpetrator drove drunk.
From the point of view of the actual crime victim and other potential crime victims, whether the person who stole my car was a professional thief or a homeless person who planned to sell it to buy food doesn’t matter.
We have to determine the consequences flowing from the commission of a crime not from the perpetrator’s point of view, but rather from the society’s point of view. What matters is the kind of a society the sentence will promote for the overwhelming majority of law-abiding citizens who have to live in the same world as the criminal.
It is impossible to run a rational judicial system or to have a livable society where the consequences for the commission of a crime vary depending on why the criminal did it rather than what s/he did.
If we create various classes of criminals whose sentences are based on why they needed the money or on the level of terrible events that propelled them into their criminal conduct, then we will not have a livable society for the 98% of the population who are not criminals.
We can’t have a livable society where the judicial system is operated to bow to the problems of the criminal 2% who want or need or cannot stop themselves from committing crimes instead of operating to protect the 98% of the citizens who are the victims of those crimes.
The sadistic serial killer may well have been abused as a child, shunted between squalid foster homes, have been unloved and unwanted. It might well be true that it wasn’t his/her fault that their psyche was warped beyond repair before s/he was even old enough to legally drive a car.
When that killer comes to trial for raping and murdering a single mother and her three tender-age children we can’t say, “Because forces beyond his control made him into a monster, he should get a lower sentence.”
His warped mentality does nothing to nullify the other reasons why we imprison people who commit bad acts — for the protection of the rest of society from them and from others who might emulate their conduct.
A middle-aged housewife viciously and violently murders her eleven-year-old step-son, stuffs his body into a suitcase and throws it off a bridge in Florida’s Alligator Alley.
When she is finally caught she admits to murdering the boy, but claims that an alternate personality inside her head took control of her body and committed the heinous crime.
Even if we could be sure that was true (and we can never really be sure) we still have to lock her up to prevent her from committing other heinous acts in the future and also to deter others who might think that they might be able to get away with killing someone by claiming that an alternate personality inside their head told them to do it.
A person who is admittedly insane decapitates his two roommates because the voices in his head convince him that they are minions of Satan and are going to murder him unless he kills them first.
We put people in a hospitals in order to heal them. If a dangerous person’s mental illness cannot be cured then there is no reason to put them in a hospital.
Even if we could be sure that the murderer was truly insane, he still needs to be isolated, and since there is no cure for his insanity, there is no point in placing the perpetrator in a hospital instead of isolating him in a prison.
If extraordinary circumstances in a criminal’s life do justify a lesser sentence, then that is an issue to be resolved by either the parole board or a pardon or clemency from the governor after conviction and sentencing.
— David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
