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The Morality of Punishment for Long Past Crimes
CaptainNemo
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Forgive me if this thread already exists, but the Film thread made me wonder something. Does time heal old wounds, morally speaking?
Say I do something awful in the past, and then spend 30 years doing just regular things. Should I still be punished for what happened three decades ago?
On the one hand, I feel as though everyone should be held accountable for their actions. On the other hand, what's the point of holding 90 year old Nazis at trial when they can't even move unaided?
I suppose it comes down to a matter of, for lack of a better term, repentance in a lot of peoples eyes. Sorry if I'm rambling,
I'm having trouble sleeping.
Say I do something awful in the past, and then spend 30 years doing just regular things. Should I still be punished for what happened three decades ago?
On the one hand, I feel as though everyone should be held accountable for their actions. On the other hand, what's the point of holding 90 year old Nazis at trial when they can't even move unaided?
I suppose it comes down to a matter of, for lack of a better term, repentance in a lot of peoples eyes. Sorry if I'm rambling,
I'm having trouble sleeping.
PSN:CaptainNemo1138
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Kind of what statutes of limitations are about. Past a certain point, it's not worth the resources of law enforcement to seek out lawbreakers. Also, after some time, vital evidence starts getting harder and harder to get access to, and the whole things becomes more about retribution than justice, with a higher likelihood of erroneously sentencing innocent people for crimes they did not commit, but can't argue due to selective/lacking availability of evidence so far down the line.
Now, with war crimes the justification for not having statutes of limitations is that initially finding evidence and witnesses may be very difficult due to contributing factors of victimization and overall chaos that war and atrocities cause. That is true to a point, but at this point with 90+ year old disabled nazis, it's 100% about retribution and not justice. Most witnesses are long dead and what evidence remains may be a tiny fraction of what used to be around in the previous decades.
It's a PR thing, really.
And yeah, what Rhan said.
Sorry, I'm a little fuzzy right now.
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I've a bit of a problem with your original post, CaptainNemo. I expect this was prompted by the recurring discussion of Polanski in the Movie thread. Your post is so general and vague, though, that the discussion is likely to be about abstract principles and as vague as the initial post. Which may be what you're after, but I think that unless the conversation is entirely about the legal ins and outs of such situation, it's more interesting to look at specific cases and see whether, where and how they differ.
Another question that's likely to be relevant is this: what's the purpose of the legal process? Is it primarily to punish, to rehabilitate or to make sure that the perpetrators can never repeat their crimes? Where people come down on these factors will surely determine where they stand with respect to your 90-year-old Nazis, Roman Polanski or anyone in a similar position.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
I think that, while people should be rehabilitated, other people will always want retribution. Like in the 90 year old Nazi example.
Polanski is a much more difficult case, because he was convicted, has confessed, avoided all punishment, and forty years on hasn't commited a crime since, and the victim wishes to let the matter die. On the one hand, the heinous nature of the crime and his unrepentant nature pisses a lot of people off, leading to desire for retribution.
On the other, its been forty years and locking him up will accomplish little.
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The senior ones do but the idea here is to scare the middle men, mid ranking army officers, officials, bureaucrats who usually end up being the ones facilitating and implementing war crimes. The message here is, "when we crush your regime, we're coming for you next".
In a nutshell, think of the guys running the trains to Auschwitz.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
I'm interested in how effective this tactic is. Like what does a perpertrator of the Rwandan Genocide think of Nazis getting prosecuted at old ages, for instance.
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Likely the same effect as death penalty for murderers. I.e. next to no effect. People don't think about these things when committing the crimes in question.
Hell, the Mossad nazi-hunters committed numerous serious crimes and nobody called them up on it due to PR reasons.
At this point, severe punishment of war crimes is done due to public demand, but I'm highly skeptical of that tactic actually dissuading further such crimes from happening. If one is inclined towards it, knowing that somewhere down the line there's going to be severe punishments if they end up on the losing side doesn't really stop them from committing the crimes in question.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
The concept of statute of limitations has less to do with the idea that after so much time has passed, someone should get a clean pass and more to do with the idea that after so much time has passed, it can be unreasonably difficult for an innocent individual to fairly defend themselves. Evidence disappears over time, witnesses move / die, memories get fuzzy, etc.
I definitely think in a practical sense it's reasonable that only the most horrible acts (murder), acts that were covered up and new evidence that makes it prosecutable came to light (like when DNA testing came on the scene) or victims were suppressed and had no reasonable opportunity to seek justice (child sexual abuse) have exemptions to statutes of limitations. The same goes for things like war crimes, where the scale and complexity of the situations can mean decades before a case can be built and the accused brought before a court.
I don't ever think it's immoral to punish someone who was convicted via due process to serve their sentence regardless of the timeframe. I don't care if they are a sick 90 year old man, until they serve their sentence - even if the judge is compassionate and reduces it to time served / compassionate release, they still should face justice. What IS immoral and unjust is if someone who was convicted of a crime and escaped before they could face justice gets a free pass while people who don't escape justice are still punished.
Time doesn't heal all wounds. A system that doesn't enforce it's own laws can't be just - this is pretty much the flip side of vigilantism.
With Polanski in particular, I don't think the government should expend serious time and effort getting him back, but his extradition should always be an active / open topic that is continually reviewed and pursued. If he ever does set foot in the US or somewhere we have a strong legal case for extraditing him back to the US, we absolutely should go for it. Rich people should never be able to just buy their way out of crimes because they can hop a private jet and afford enough lawyers to prevent extradition.
I actually think you're coming at this from the wrong angle for Statue of Limitations. That is about the person accused rights rather than any state interest.
If I say you pushed a man down a well when you were five and are now fifty, would you have any ability at all to defend yourself? Could you remember where you were forty five years ago? Could you even find the people who might verify your story? Manage that and I have a list of other horrible things you did at 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. You'll be lucky to have any time not on trial at all!
It's another of those things like our absolute double jeopardy protections where it clear that early Americans had a good idea of what living under a dick government was like.
I think that letting Calley off was bullshit. Thank Nixon for that, both the house arrest and the eventual pardon.
But I think the treatment the former Nazis receive is how it SHOULD be. Someone who takes part in genocide - be it in Germany, Vietnam, Rwanda, Cambodia, etc should spend the rest of their life wondering if today is the day they are going to be caught and dragged off.
Also, I should not that we don't 'arrest' these 90 year old guards. We simply deport them. They never should have been permitted entrance / residency in the United States in the first place because they lied when they applied for a visa / residency / citizenship. Which, since the lie on their application is an ongoing fraud, doesn't even enter into consideration when we talk about punishment for long-past crimes as their residency fraud is a constant and ongoing crime.
I'm comfortable with that set-up.
The victim's point is that Polanski's original plea agreement was going to be voided by a grandstanding judge who wanted to improve his reputation as being tough on crime by sticking it to an arrogant european.
Judicial malfeasance is also much more damaging to our society than any one rich person evading the long arm of the law.
-edit-
That isn't to say I don't think we should arrest him if he sets foot in the country again, we totally should.
Also I think it's fine to say "this isn't about the victim anymore, it's about escape" but if you are going to discount the victim completely then the moral outrage over the crime committed against her also needs to go. Sometimes people like to double dip, saying the victim is irrelevant but then getting all preachy about the crime committed against her. This reduces her to sub-human status, she's no longer a person or even a victim. Just a cardboard cutout to point to while pontificating dramatically about how terrible a crime is but don't you dare open your mouth, woman.
Yeah, fair enough.
In relation to war crimes though, the evidence should be very damning and pretty much rock-solid. At least this particular case seems to be getting handled through the channels and not the israeli way(i.e. kidnapping in a foreign country, show trial in Israel followed by murder(which it is since it's not a legitimately handled legal case and court)).
True, but unfortunately, punishment is a poor deterrent - especially punishment delayed.
For the deterrence effect to work, punishment must be probable and swift.
In Roman Polanski's case, I'm fine letting the matter drop, for the reasons CaptainNemo said. Pursuing the matter would be emotionally damaging to a lot of people - particularly the victim - and isn't likely to do much good.
But in the general case? I don't know.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I find these arguments persuasive.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
On the other hand, grandstanding against the casting couch isn't the worst thing in the world either. Hollywood has a long and sordid history of using women as things, and too often the courts there looked the other way. Furthermore, there's a reason that criminal cases are The State Versus X - the damage is not just to the victim, but to society as well. The point of going after Polanski isn't retribution for his crime, but to send a message that this behavior is not acceptable, period.
Reduce the criminal justice system to a pure abstraction, where the victim is irrelevant and we're only concerned with "damage to society" at your own risk.
Why is it the same crime to murder a hobo and a doctor?
It is measurably not the same damage to society. Murdering old sick people is barely damagy at all!
We treat murder as murder because they're all people and they all deserve justice.
I'm not impressed by people who think the victim of a crime can be set aside in favor of glorious abstractions.
Below is me playing devil's advocate, because I completely agree with you.
The 'real' or 'direct' damage of that individual's murder, be it a hobo or a doctor, is negligible compared to the damage to our society if the state were to not punish murder and the breakdown in order that would result in. It's also not calculable - what if that doctor was going to screw up and kill the next Einstein / save the next Hitler, making his death a service to society? What if that hobo was going to clean up and go on to do great things?
Administratively, the only answer is to treat all murder as murder. Besides, there are other means where we value the crime differently - look at the number of hours of police investigation that will go into a murdered hobo vs. a murdered doctor. Changing the punishment (which, the jury gets to do already, and does...) is adjusting for something that's already adjusted for.
The suffering or wishes of the actual victim are irrelevant or far less relevant than society as a whole. There are unarguably situations where prosecution harms the victim more and the immediate effects harm society (say, a wife beater that's the breadwinner put in prison, wife and children lose their house / go on assistance).
You have to set aside the victim to some degree, because they are rarely in a position to see the matter completely. There's a reason that we changed the laws around prosecuting domestic violence to exclude victim input on pressing charges. Geimer shouldn't be making any decisions about whether or not Polanski should be tried, and the courts were right to reject her petition.
Her opinion on the plea agreement has merit. Here the matter was about to be laid to rest so she could move on and the judge decided that the career acceleration he could achieve by blowing the case up was of primary importance.
I find her opinion on this point very relevant. The judge exposed her to a lifetime of media attention that she did not want, and he didn't do it for society.
We also have to recognize that this method of prosecuting DV victims is meant to protect people with a lot less agency and a lot more to lose than Geimer. Geimer isn't somebody who is going to keep going back to her abuser; she's not afraid she'll be homeless if her abuser is thrown in jail.
I agree with your statement here: "grandstanding against the casting couch isn't the worst thing in the world either. Hollywood has a long and sordid history of using women as things, and too often the courts there looked the other way."
But I think the Polanski case is both weird and difficult. If we can't take the peculiar circumstances of each abuse case into account when making prosecutorial (fuck it, it's a word now) decisions, I think everybody loses out.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It's funny that you're willing to call the judge self-serving, but ignore the self-serving nature of the victim's request, where she asks people to allow privilege to trump justice. Furthermore, it wasn't the judge who exposed her to media attention, but Polanski through his cowardly and self-serving act of fleeing justice - one last attack on her.
This comment I found sums up not just this matter but the thread for me:
I don't see the problem with affording some weight to the self-interested feelings of the victim.
If you are so ready to discount the feelings of the victim, I wonder how you can feel so strongly about the criminal act in the first place.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Yeah, they would. As long as the country doesn't have a history of civil rights abuses and the person could be reasonably expected to get a fair trial.
We've extradited quite a few citizens to Canada, G20 stuff in Toronto I remember in particular, but I'm sure there is more. Not sure about the rest of the world, but I recall (no specifics) on a few citizens extradited from the US for murder.
EDIT - also came up with Amanda Knox, if she would be extradited back to Italy if they were going to try her a second time. The consensus seemed to be no, because of our views on double jeopardy and the details of that crime...but it wasn't an automatic no.
It's not weird or difficult at all. You have an individual who presumed that his position and prestige would protect him, and a judge who decided to show him that wasn't the case. The plea bargain he had arranged wasn't even a slap on the wrist. Yes, the judge's conduct was horrid, which was why he was ultimately removed. And let's not forget that the victim recieved a sizable settlement from Polanski as well.
It's not shocking that there are european countries that consider extraditing to the U.S. to be little different than extraditing to a totalitarian state.
Yes, we do extradite, but with a lot of caveats and gotchas. We deny a lot of requests for a lot of different reasons - the least of which is that we require probable cause, which is a higher legal standard than some other first world countries.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yeah. I think "damage to society" is the wrong phrase to use. What we talking about is what is in the interest of society. Even when we give weight to the wishes of the victim, we only do so because such a thing is good for society.
The United States are scary.