By C.P.
Here’s an idea: Instead of letting Jared Loughner (the 23 year old who killed six people and wounded 13 including former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords during a shooting spree in Tuscon) plea to life in prison, the government should have made Mr. Loughner stand trial.
Many people might think that this is a preposterous suggestion. Some might ask, “Why should Arizonians be forced to endure a difficult and potentially lengthy trial? Isn’t it better just to put this matter to rest as quickly as possible?” Others might attack the usefulness of a trial by pointing out “a trial is not going to bring those killed back from the dead.” Attorney General Eric Holder and U.S. Attorney for Arizona, John Leonardo gave these explanations, respectively, when asked to comment on Loughner’s plea deal. (http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/07/13163448-jared-loughner-pleads-guilty-to-tucson-shootings-avoids-death-penalty?lite)
Although a trial will not bring the dead back to their loved ones, it might help the victim’s families deal with the pain of this tragedy and bring restorative justice to the community. Even though our criminal justice system does not value it, there is a restorative power to letting a victim tell their story. Plea bargains, however, value efficiency and expediency over truth.
Without a trial, there is no record of what happened that day according to the victim. A plea bargain produces no story. Although we all know what basically happened that awful day in January of 2011, we don’t have an official public record of the story from the perspective of the surviving victims, and we should. Should we put a premium the type of justice in our criminal-justice system that focuses on punishing Loughner over a justice that seeks to heal victims’ wounds and have their stories head?
I never thought about what was lost by offering notorious criminals like Loughner to plea guilty for life in prison. I always figured that it was a good thing not to make a spectacle of the crimes committed, as the news media is so prone to doing. But you made an excellent point about the restorative justice available through trial. Truth has a very powerful effect on people’s sense of closure, and is sometimes all that can be offered to victims. Being able to go through the facts of the event and the background of the criminal may be very therapeutic and help victims understand and digest what they were made victim to.
This post really highlights the different shades of the meaning of justice. The judicial system must change to address the public’s need for both retributive and restorative justice.
While the idea of restorative justice may be a noble cause, it ignores a huge issue that would be unavoidable if there was ever any real effort to reform our criminal justice system. Anyone who follows the criminal justice system has undoubtedly heard time and time again about limited resources. Our judges and courts are already overwhelmed, and while it is easy to claim that we should value justice over efficiency, the unfortunate truth is that efficiency is a necessary evil. Without plea bargains, our courts would be forced to hear countless lengthy and costly trials, only to arrive at the same outcome (or potentially an outcome that provides even less closure and justice to the victims). So while it may be a nice idea to allow every victim to tell their story, and hope that they will have some sense of closure as a result, it would create an unbearable burden on the system itself, and would be impossible to implement.
This was a very interesting post. While I agree with the ideas behind it, I have to agree with G.C.’s comment about the difficulty of such a system based on the finite resources available as it is. It would be great if we could make every criminal go to trial, be tried in front of a jury of their peers, and be sentenced to a punishment that suits the crime they committed. That said, given the time and expense that trials require, our system of justice is simply unable to bear the burden. Considering that our justice system is often overwhelmed as it is, with only approximately 3% of all cases going to trial, it is simply impossible to think that we could bring every case to trial all the time, without some major overhaul of the legal system. I do agree that it would be nice to give victims and their families more closure, and that there are some ways that we could do so without requiring a massive overhaul of the justice system. Something we discussed in class that I found interesting was the idea of including an apology or something similar as part of a settlement. I do believe that the legal system’s focus solely on monetary damages could be changed in a way that looks at more than just money, taking into consideration feelings of the victims and their families in adopting settlements.
I have always had a hard time wrapping my head around the criminal system of justice in this country. We try, but bless our hearts, do we succeed? Hard to say. Our imperfect system allows some criminals to escape the law entirely, others allowed their day in court and yet released on technicalities or poor lawyering. Innocents are often blamed, put through the rigors of the judicial machinery and either released after a harrowing experience or punished for someone else’s misdeeds. Trials are arduous, expensive, emotionally and physically draining, and they don’t even guarantee the correct result. We have invented a labyrinth of legal contraptions that may allow the circumvention of this process, the plea bargain is a shining example. So what is the point of all this anyway? I suppose it’s to make us feel better. We can’t sit back and do nothing while criminals ravage our society, but we also can’t guarantee with any certainty that what we’re doing is right, or, that we’ve even got the right guy. Perhaps the whole thing is meant to be therapeutic. Maybe it really doesn’t matter if the bad guy is behind bars or not. Maybe we just like knowing that we made him stand up and account for it, that he had to stand there and take it while someone outed him and all his shortcomings. After all, what’s done is done. A trial won’t bring back the dead, won’t erase the memory of the bank robbery, or the hijacking or the stolen t-shirt. Maybe we all just need to go through it, and our limited resources force us to pick and choose our villains.
While I agree with you that a plea bargain undoubtedly deprives the victim’s of Loughner’s crimes of moral justice, I think its important to remember that, in our legal system, a trial is not necessarily the solution either. Ideally, the victims should have the opportunity to tell their stories, to have their suffering acknowledged, and perhaps even to get an apology from Loughner, but the procedural hurdles of a US trial (like rules of evidence) make achieving spiritual justice very difficult. Perhaps there is a solution that can provide relief for the victims, while at the same time addressing the administrative and financial concerns that G.C. mentions above. What if, as part of a plea bargain, perpetrators of crimes (and maybe even the public) were required to listen to the victim’s stories and acknowledge their pain and suffering? Jailtime just doesn’t seem like enough – if Loughner is going to escape the death penalty, he should have to provide some type of restitution to the families that he damaged, monetarily and emotionally.
I certainly understand the practical arguments in favor of plea bargains and settlements. I think its probably true that forcing every case to be heard in court will put a significant cost on our court systems. But is this efficiency more important than justice? One might argue that justice is served in the settlement payments or the sentences given in a plea bargain. However, the truth being told is arguably an important element of justice.
This seems to be especially important in the context of a criminal case. In the civil context, the settlement is at least negotiated between the plaintiff and defendant. The plaintiff is given the choice to give up their day in court. In the context of a criminal trial, the plea bargain is negotiated by the prosecutor and the defendant. The victims’ families arguably have no choice in the matter. The decision, therefore, whether or not the case goes to court and the “truth” is told, is not made by the victims or the victims’ families. Is justice ever truly served without the truth being told?
I obviously agree with Me that our criminal system of justice doesn’t always get it right and a trial may not be the right process to achieve justice, but there is something to be said about having the truth come out (albeit through the limited and objectively standardized way that the courts and their rules permit). Victims should be able to tell their story and try to grasp the meaning of what happened to them by having all of the facts laid out. Plea bargains, while great for efficiency purposes and all of that, seem to be the easy way out; they deprive the victims and the community at large from their chance to explore what occurred, have all of the background story laid out, and try to get some sort of closure from it all. Sometimes, efficiency needs to be put aside to make way for morality and for truth, though it seems like a rare thing these days.