@walterallenhaxton First of all, a crime is an offense against the state, not the victim. It is the state which punishes, presumably for some utilitarian purpose, such as deterring crime or suppressing crime. It does not punish to give satisfaction to the victim—or at least it shouldn’t.
The “criminal justice system” is a misnomer. The police, the courts and the prisons are not about Justice, they are about the law, which may or may not be “just” in it’s application. Punishing the possession of crack cocaine 100 times more severely than powdered cocaine, for example, knowing that this is mainly going to impact blacks, turns the law into a tool of oppression. Indeed, punishing people severely for possession of powdered cocaine violates the principle of proportionality which Justice requires that punishments fit the crime. Justice, then, is decided by the legislature and not by the courts, especially when they limit the discretion of judges with such things as mandatory minimums, enhancements, and “three strikes.”
Making the victim whole is the province of insurance, not the law or the courts. Most states have a victim-witness restitution fund, a kind of insurance of sorts, but most of them make it practically impossible for victims to get anything near full reimbursement for their losses. The reason for that is that the only money that goes into these funds is paid by prisoners, who earn maybe 9 to 45 cents per hour (and most of whom are drug offenders who do not have any actual victims). Since the demand is far in excess of what these restitution funds can pay out, benefits are correspondingly limited. That, however, is a political decision; and it has been decided by our legislatures that the public would rather have a few people suffer the uncompensated loss of being victimized than to inconvenience the many with slightly higher taxes.
The idea that “justice” consists of the victim being “made whole” by witnessing and taking enjoyment from the suffering of his victimizer is both archaic and barbaric. It has no place in a civilized society. That is why we no longer have public hangings, floggings, mutilations and the like. Such brutality often exceeds the savagery of the crime itself, and it accustoms the spectators to a ferocity from one wishes to divert them. In such a system, the executioner comes to resemble a criminal, judges murderers, causing a reversal of roles which makes the tortured criminal an object of pity. It also makes the state complicit in the crime.
In France and other areas of Europe that follow the Napoleonic tradition, rather than our adversarial English Common Law tradition, there is much more emphasis on finding out the whole story behind the crime and thereby reconciling the criminal and his victim, and both to society as a whole. I saw a documentary recently about a gay man in France who was beaten to nearly death with a stick by a group of skinheads who had gone out that evening looking for someone to bash, and they threw him in a lake, where he drowned. Rather than demonizing the kids and giving them all the same penalty, as the prosecutors would do in our system, there was a careful investigation of the motives, the actions, the politics, and the intellectually deprived backgrounds of the perpetrators, even extending the complicity and culpability of the parents who let them run wild, tolerated their anti-social behavior, covered for them, and tried to destroy evidence of the crime.
It was determined that one of the kids was younger than the rest and was just following along under peer pressure, so to speak, and once the enormity of what he had done sunk in during the course of the trial, he seemed to express something close to genuine remorse. He was considered a good candidate for rehabilitation and he was given a lesser sentence than the two other young adults who participated. The main perpetrators got about 18 years in prison, instead of life, which they would have gotten here. One of the fathers got 2 years for destroying evidence. The sentence was based on practical considerations, not vengeance. After 18–20 years they would be more mature and therefore less of a risk to society. The victims of the tragedy were able to come to terms with their loss and even forgive the perpetrators who expressed remorse. It was much more civilized than our system.
In the present case, we don’t know the whole story. Usually, when a child murders a parent, there is a long history of some kind of abuse. As you will notice, there was no weight given to anything like that in the factors considered And she didn’t do the murder herself, she merely asked someone else to do it. Had that person come to his senses and not gone through with it, there very likely would have been no crime. Here it does hurt to ask. In any case, if she had been tried as an adult and gotten life in prison, the punishment would have been far worse than the crime. It is utterly barbaric to sentence a child to life in prison. We are the only country in the world that does so, and other countries look at us with a combination of horror and disgust because of it.
Another thing to know about murder is that most murders murder their own family members, usually in the heat of passion, and often under the diminished capacity of alcohol or drugs. The vast majority of such murderers never murder again because the situations are so personal, extreme and unique. The juvenile system can hold this girl until she is 25 if she is not fit to release before then. From the sound of it, she poses no danger of harming you or yours, assuming she isn’t brutalized beyond reckoning in prison.
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