Category: Victims

A day after that horrible 2016 election I was mourning not only what was to become a national nightmare, but also the failure of California’s Prop 62, which would have abolished the death penalty. I was on the radio talking about it and someone asked me what I would say to the victims’ families. I replied, “first of all, all the sympathy and empathy in the world. And second, if you have lost someone you love, surely you wouldn’t want to revisit this suffering–with a real risk that the person is innocent–on anyone else’s family.”

Some people took offense to that, and I got some hate mail, including a fairly alarming death threat. But I still do feel that the notion that not everyone who has lost a loved one to homicide looks for closure in the form of the death penalty or other severe sentence bears repeating.

I’m writing about this as the verdict has come out in a case involving the murder of my colleague and friend Dan Markel. Sigfredo Garcia was found guilty; there’s a hung jury in Katherine Magbanua’s case; and the people many of us think are the real culprits, the Adelsons, have so far completely escaped the clutches of the criminal justice system.

Susan Bandes has a a few papers about the notion of “closure”, as something that the criminal justice system is supposed to deliver and as something people assume they’ll get out of a conviction and a sentence. Her findings dovetail with what I found when working on the Kavanaugh piece and on the Progressive Punitivism piece: the idea that expressing anger through the criminal justice system will bring some form of cathartic relief is unsupported by behavioral science. In working on Yesterday’s Monsters, one of the things that most filled me with sorrow was how victims who are singlemindedly invested in punitive outcomes against those who killed their loved ones (and the Tate family literally wrote the book on this–it’s called Restless Souls) find so little solace in doing so.

I don’t think that nonretributive, nonpunitive victims are more “saintly” than punitive ones. All emotions, including rancor AND forgiveness, are part of the human experience (as we recently found out, if anything, people find it hard to accept that forgiveness is human, and insist on shining some critical light on it).

Dan, who studied retributive justice (here, here, and here), would have found it interesting that what I most wanted from the criminal justice system was an affirmation of the narrative of What Happened. I’m not at all invested in the Adelsons being  arrested, tried, convicted, and incarcerated, let alone executed–that they have to live with themselves strikes me as the worst possible punishment. Not because I’m some sort of saintly, forgiving creature–I simply found out something about myself and what I want from the criminal justice system. And even if we, Dan’s family and friends, ever get it, it won’t bring our friend back.

Perhaps one of the things that most saddens me in America’s punitive victim rights movement is how it offers you the One and Only Way to be an appropriate victim, without allowing you to sit with your own fresh emotions and feelings–grief? anger? frustration? loss?–and process them with yourself, between you and your soul, without a giant machine of a social narrative to run you over. There’s not nearly enough quiet, be it in the right-wing halls of the anti-superpredator chorus or in the left-wing halls of #metoo, for you to sit with yourself and be whoever you are with your own feelings.

Much love and support to Dan’s family and friends today. What is remembered, lives.

Those of you familiar with the Central Park Five case should be under no doubt that, despite Trump’s insistence on propagating a strange narrative of the case, the five teenagers railroaded into confessing and sentenced to years in prison have been completely exonerated and compensated, with a single perpetrator’s confession backed up by solid DNA evidence.

You may also recall that the victim, Trisha Meili, who was violently assaulted and left for dead, has no memory of the attack. But she apparently does not see this as a barrier to opining about guilt and innocence.

In my forthcoming book Yesterday’s Monsters: The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole (forthcoming Feb. 2020 from UC Press) I discuss the serious problems that happen when we reify the perspectives of people at the heart of trauma regarding things they are not qualified to comment on, such as the sincerity of parole hopefuls, their participation in rehabilitative programming, and even their physical health. And here we have a person who cannot recall the attack pushing for a political outcome, claiming the authority to do so because of her victimization.

Trisha Meili suffered horribly at the hands of someone terrifyingly violent and deserves every sympathy and compassion for that horrible ordeal, as well as respect and admiration for regaining her health. But she has no authority or special knowledge to chime in about events she does not recall or to use her authority as a “moral memory” of the crime to push for processes that completely contradict forensic evidence.

This is what happens when we decide that trauma itself is an admission ticket to the discourse. And lest we forget, the right has not cornered the market on this reification of victims.