Politics and Dharma

A major difficulty in even bringing up problems with the criminal justice system is an apparently universal assumption that any convicted felon is worthy of any torment we can lay upon him. Only in the case of an innocent man executed by the state can there be the appropriate sense of indignity at the incompetence of the system. For if the other 99 out of 100 clerical errors, bumbling lawyers, and judicial misrepresentations fall upon the heads of father-rapers and mother-stabbers, then it’s all okay.

Most of the time, we can’t even question whether a law that simply creates more felons is even necessary. Felons are “Bad People”, and we certainly don’t want any of those around. Why question the time honored process?

pointed out the Richards case, where the curt retort of a sitting judge effectively trumped legal precedent, resulting in a man’s execution. The response he got was, effectively, “the convict deserved no pity” But that’s not the point. Through her rote indifference, the judge violated the process designed to — and, to a large degree, the social contract to — protect the innocent. Never mind that this particular convict really had done bad things: if we allow this to become a reason for us to do bad things, then what are we becoming?

The local daily tells an interesting story about our modern Scarlet Letter: “Sex Offender”. No one would want a “convicted sex offender” living near them, so the city has a policy that convicted sex offenders must register with a database that results in notifications being sent out to all their neighbors to let them know who just moved in. Only because of a clerical error in this case, the notice didn’t go out until the next owner of the property took up residence. So all the neighbors now think that this regular guy is a pedophile and he can’t get the city to send out corrections.

To a large degree, the whole ’sex offender’ label is nonsense anyway. People always assume it refers to pedophilia, but in most cases, it’s applied for date rape or other aggressive behavior between adults. I agree that it makes sense to keep the fellows who like the little boys away from the little boys, but this is simply too broad a brush. Given the variety of sexual taboo in this country, it’s surprising that there isn’t a lot more ’sex offenders’ being brought in for owning too many dildoes or having the wrong kind — or too many — intimate friends.

In the meantime, the guy who was the convicted sex offender had already been carted back off to jail for missing child support payments, but because the city had lost the guy’s file, the fact of the guy’s subsequent re-arrest wasn’t part of the file when it was found. So because the city file doesn’t show that he “moved”, our felonious sex offender now also has been charged with failing to “register” his move to the county jail. Never mind if this guy was Jeffrey Dahmer, when you make it as difficult as possible for someone to get a job, and then snatch him back into the pen a few months later, you don’t get the right to complain that a prisoner didn’t go to all the various agencies prior to his arrest to inform them of his “impending move”. That’s just stupid.

What’s worse is when all this incompetence becomes enshrined as “tradition”: it’s a lot harder to fight against the inequities of the system from the inside after you been nicked by an aggressive, incompetent beat cop, and treated to a bumbling, court-appointed lawyer. So maybe now might be a good time to think about how we’re treating our neighbors, before we get the treatment ourselves.