“Obama’s Historic Day of Clemency” (Atlantic) was a topic of discussion on our cruise ship. President Obama cut short the sentences of 214 out of 200,000 federal prisoners.
I found the discussion interesting because people who didn’t know any of the facts around these 214 cases assumed that the original sentences were “just.” I probed a little to figure out why and it was as simple as faith in the American justice system. There was a law. There was a judge. The two intersected in a sentence of X years and therefore the sentence of X years was by definition “justice.”
Yet the cruise itself showed that “justice” can be a relative term. The Soviets who deported wealthier and/or more troublesome Estonians to Siberia were criminals from the Estonians point of view, but not from the Russian point of view. The rolling text at the end of the BBC/HBO dramatization of the Wannsee Conference, in which the murder of millions was planned, shows that a lot of the participants were sentenced to just a few years in prison. By contrast, our guide in Latvia told us that, after World War II, the KGB had investigated the murder of Jews in Riga, tracked down Latvian collaborators, and sentenced them to 25 years of hard labor in Siberia. One of the passengers at our table had a friend who was in his 16th year of an 80-year sentence imposed by a Texas court. The friend was in his 40s when he had consensual sex with a 16-year-old girl. He will be eligible for parole after 18 years. Our tablemate, a retired Texas schoolteacher, expressed the opinion that the 80-year sentence was unjust, but was quick to add “I’m not saying that what he did was right.” It was pointed out that what his friend did would have been legal in a lot of states. (Wikipedia confirms this; regarding European countries, Wikipedia says “15 is the most common age of consent in the European Union” and in fact his friend could not have been prosecuted in any of the countries that we visited (Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Denmark).)
Americans don’t seem to have a lot of faith in the executive or legislative branches of government so I was kind of surprised at the extent to which people assumed that the judicial branch was faultless and its decisions shouldn’t be meddled with.
Dura lex sed lex.
Sorry, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the fact that something is legal somewhere else tells nothing about the judicial system here. The questions that matter should be
1. Was it legal here?
2. Was it prosecuted objectively according to the law.
The fact that the laws are stupid are besides the point for *this particular* discussion.
The potential for stupid laws producing injustice is one of the reasons for giving the President the power of executive clemency. Therefore, whether or not a law is stupid is relevant to deciding if one agrees with a President’s decision to grant clemency to someone imprisoned for violating that law.
I think you are perhaps missing the key component here. This is a battleground country – for most of these people the fact that Obama did it is enough for them, it must be a terrible idea.
I think Americans have an overdeveloped sense of justice and fairness, so if someone is arrested, they feel that the police MUST have had a good reason to arrest him. And OF COURSE the trial was fair, after all, both sides had lawyers.
One of the most equal-tempered, kindest and sincerest people I’ve worked with in my industry was sentenced, at age 19, for forty years of prison for possessing what would now be a joke: a little over half-pound of marijuana. The year was 1980 and Virginia was attempting to drop the hammer on drug dealers.
He did over four years before his sentence was commuted by a new governor. (He was advised by his hired attorney to plead guilty)
The media presents the judicial branch in a much better light than the other ones, presumably in part to increase support for judicial activism.
“Americans don’t seem to have a lot of faith in the executive or legislative branches of government so I was kind of surprised at the extent to which people assumed that the judicial branch was faultless and its decisions shouldn’t be meddled with.”
I think this is partly conflating judicial branch with others that contribute to the outcome: police and investigators (and prosecutors in most senses) are under executive branch control. So how they decide on arrests, how they execute those arrests or how they pursue cases can lead to insensible outcomes. On the other hand a lot of sentences handed out by judges are of course a result of mandatory sentencing laws created by legislative/executive branches.
Keep in mind that the people you’re talking to who have so much faith in the judicial branch are a bunch of rich (probably white) people on a cruise ship. They’re not the ones who are the intended targets of the US legal system–on the contrary, the system exists primarily _for them_. Try going into a poor neighborhood and talking to people with dark skin, and you’ll get a very different view of the judicial branch.
@ Ken Hagler: + 1
Phil, ad-hoc polls like this are always interesting for their novelty and anecdotal value, but, unless checked for class, etc., bias, and carefully weighted for sanity afterwards, are just like forgettable cocktail party banter. Or a blog post? ;-))
In this particular case, the returns mainly show that those fellow passengers interviewed by you are by and large ignorant of (chose to be/ have no use for) jurisprudence and such penal codes that—presumably—do not directly affect their investments. Were they somehow drawn into some legal imbroglio or other, they’d simply “outsource” the handling of it to their lawyers—whom they could afford, just as they can afford a $5000/ week leisure cruise around the Baltic (do not mistake my words for envy). That’s Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” country, and look how it ended up for the Master of the Universe White Fella (as compared to the fate of his no less complicit Trophy Mistress).
Still, there was another thread in that your post that deserves a separate comment, next.
By contrast [to the perceived always correct American justice, see above],
Rrrrrrright, yet another Baltic nation full of survivors of unwarranted oppression, and from the KGB no less, yet somehow never guilty of anything themselves. I don’t doubt that that’s what your guide innerly believed, the narrative of blanket victimhood that is their Fate… after all, that’s the best displacement tactic they’ve got for their [pretty small countries’ all] collective “misbehavior” during WWII. Because, what we call the Holocaust, which took the Nazi Germans 3 years to conduct in Central Europe, the Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians managed to execute (apt word!) all on their own in less than 10 weeks in the summer of 1941 – after that there were no more available “Jewish Russian proxies” to mass-murder. This is something that has to be kept in mind when dealing with the Balts… though even had you known that, I doubt that your fellow cruisers would appreciate bringing up in public. This is not a forum for discussing that in depth, so I’ll end now with a link and a quote.
The link goes to a debunking of a hot-shot historian’s book that essentially gives all the WWII EE “willing local executioners” (to paraphrase Daniel J. Goldhagen) a blanket excuse for their anti-Semitic genocidal deeds: they had a carte-blanche from the invading—heck, no! liberating them from Russian yoke—Germans. It’s a 60kB long review, so scroll down to the 2nd of 6 instances of the keyword “Estonia” (well worth reading in toto otherwise).
The quote below is from a advance copy (once we’d call it galleys) of a review of Andrew Nagorski’s “The Nazi Hunters” (2016) written by the 75yo Holocaust survivor, émigré Polish writer Henryk Grynberg (Washington, D.C.) It has an aviation component that might tickle your appetite for further research. [Hypertextual embellishments are mine.]