ASPECTS OF OUR JUSTICE SYSTEM WEAKEN THE CONCEPTS OF HONESTY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND TREATING OTHERS FAIRLY
Christopher Ebbe, Ph.D. 5-25
Our justice system is set up for the purpose of enforcing our laws and reaffirming for everyone that there is justice, but this task should also include affirming the values that underlie the system—in this case, honesty, responsibility, and the undesirability of harming others. Unfortunately, some aspects of our system instead erode these values in the eyes of citizens.
PLEADING NOT GUILTY
I have the impression from the news, books, and movies/videos that for many accused, whether to plead guilty or not guilty has become a decision about the chances of “beating the rap” even when guilty, with no relation of this decision to whether the person did or did not commit the crime. It would be better for society if we pled guilty when we are guilty, since this would be telling the truth even when it was disadvantageous to do so. While being able to force the prosecution to “prove” one’s guilt is an important legal safeguard, the system (and society as a whole) could do more to encourage the guilty accused to tell the truth in this regard. Children have a hard time learning that it is better to tell the truth about supposed misdeeds than to lie and try to get away with it (and then be faced with evidence that proves one’s guilt). (Perhaps you yourself are not convinced of this dictum?) Many adults do not believe this, which, together with their behavior in the legal system, undermines some of society’s most important foundations—telling the truth (avoiding distorting what one knows to be true) and taking responsibility for one’s actions. Of course, we are frequently loathe to take the consequences of our actions, but the smooth and comfortable functioning of society depends on most of us most of the time telling the truth and acknowledging responsibility, and we should encourage everyone to take those consequences instead of trying to evade them. In telling the truth and taking the consequences, we make society a better place.
PLEA BARGAINING
Plea bargaining (the prosecution offering a lesser charge (and lesser punishment) in exchange for a guilty plea) also distorts our sense of truth. In agreeing to the plea offer, a person who is guilty of the greater charge is not exactly telling a lie when he/she makes the agreed-upon plea in court (admitting guilt regarding a lesser charge), but he/she is not telling the whole truth either. The main reason that a plea bargain is made is that the prosecution, after reflection, is not confident of being able to “prove” the defendant’s guilt but doesn’t want the defendant to “get away with it” completely, but wouldn’t it be better to have made the lesser charge originally instead of overcharging and then moving to a plea bargain?
Plea bargains can be a benefit for the innocent person, but it encourages lying in court (admitting that one did the crime when one really didn’t), which once again erodes our faith in what people are saying to us. This circumstance illustrates a weakness of our adversarial legal system, since it would be better for our sense of truth, in the case of an innocent defendant, for both prosecution and defense to be seeking the truth (as they do in France, for instance) rather than playing the artificial game of claiming the person was guilty versus claiming the person was not guilty, with no commitment to the truth of either claim. The jury cannot trust the honesty of either prosecution or defense, which erodes our trust in society.
TIME TO JUDGMENT.
The long waiting time for trials is directly contradictory to the Constitution’s promise of a speedy trial. This is not as serious a problem for those able to make bail as it is for those who wait for months or even a year in custody while their lives fall apart in the real world. Apparently, these long times can be due to requests by either prosecution or defense for extensions to better prepare, and it sounds, to an outsider,like most are granted by judges. Judges have the power to speed up the process by requiring good reasons for continuances. “I haven’t had time to prepare” is not a good reason even though in some circumstances it could be appropriate, and “We need to read all two million documents provided to us by the opposition” should be questioned by the judge as to applicability. Perhaps we need twice as many judges and courts to speed up the process, but this would be resisted by local and state jurisdictions as too costly. How can not following the Constitution be justified with “it costs too much”? Part of this resistance is probably due to our general prejudice against all accused (there’s no smoke without fire), which makes us suspicious and unwilling to do anything for the accused that we don’t have to do. Perhaps defendants should be enabled to insist on trial by a certain date of their choosing.
SENTENCES
We seem to think that length of sentence is the only possible variable in sentencing, so if the prescribed sentence doesn’t deter enough people, all we can imagine to do to improve things is to make the sentence for that crime longer. This has led to completely outrageous sentences, such as 30 years for murder, which is very common in our states. There is no question that every murdered person’s life must be “honored” with a serious sentence, but think about how mind-numbing and ego-destroying it would be to be in prison, with your every minute controlled by others, day after day, for ten years (3,650 days). Wouldn’t ten years be a fair trade for the murdered life? Why does it have to be 30 years (which really means having most of your life in prison)? Our long sentences lead everyone to despair of justice—the accused because it’s like losing your whole life for a crime for which execution is not applicable and society because who can even imagine the depth of punishment of being incarcerated for 30 years of more. Even more to the point, the potential sentence is not foremost in the minds of people as they murder. Most murders involve the “heat of the moment,” and the perpetrator never thinks about the length of sentence before committing the crime, so the length of sentence would only possibly deter somewhat those with a life of crime (so they would go into a crime with the intent of not killing anyone so as to avoid the long sentence, which might or might not work for a given crime depending on the moment-to-moment circumstances of the crime).
TREATMENT DURING INCARCERATION
The justice system ensures that illegal harming of others is negatively reinforced. All legal and ethical codes are premised on controlling whether and how we harm others in society. (Some harming of others, such as lying by omission, is tolerated by our society and is not illegal.) Conditions in our prisons are abominable and do great harm to the incarcerated, with many killings and beatings of each other by prisoners or even guards, and all convicts live in fear for their safety, prompting many to join a gang in prison to stay alive. This is completely inhumane and unacceptable in my opinion. The general prejudice against anyone involved in the justice system as a defendant—that they are probably bad even if not convicted—keeps most of the public from crusading for something better.
The difficulty here is that society seems to be of two minds about incarceration—on the one hand, it is punishment aimed at deterring doing the crime again and keeping others from doing it at all, and on the other hand, it is an opportunity for personal change for the convicted so he/she won’t do the crime again and will have a good enough life after prison that he/she will not be tempted to do the crime again. Lack of funds and the wish of many in society that prison time will be so awful that the person will not do the crime again and will “pay” for the current crime with his/her suffering in prison keep most prisons from doing very much in the way of rehabilitation. Most non-career criminals, in my opinion, can be “saved” through rehabilitation efforts and will never commit another crime, or would never commit another crime anyway just because of who they are–not everyone is prison is a terrible person. There are heartening stories here and there about programs that actually “convert” a goodly number of prisoners to believe in their ability to “go straight” and to develop the strengths to carry this out (belief in God, developing reading skills, working through personal problems in therapy or group discussions, believing in the good in people through interventions from outsiders like nuns or Quakers, inspiration through drama groups), but these are the exceptions. Prisons in Europe are much more rehabilitation-oriented than ours, with shorter sentences in general and opportunities very quickly for certain inmates to go out of the prison to do day jobs in the community. The inhumanity of our prison environments makes justice seem like a sham and demonstrates knowingly harming others in a way that erodes society’s underlying assumption that we should all restrain from harming others.
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