You may be expecting Monty Hall to enter from stage left and the roar of an excited crowd. If you’re my age, you’ll understand that reference to the once popular game show where contestants chose between items hidden under large boxes or behind curtains. One might win anything from a new car to a lifetime’s worth of fishsticks, depending on how well you guess, or “make a deal”, as it were. It was a popular show, as I remember, and innocent entertainment fun.
Deal making has taken on a new, more serious tone in modern America as it has become the number-one tool in meting out justice in our court systems throughout the nation. Considering the monumental task of handling the chore of administering punishment to the many criminals we have here, at first glance it seems understandable. But, if you look at the justice system as a business, then why doesn’t the “service department” expand to meet the requirements of the increased “business”? What we need, it seems, are more courts, more judges and more prisons. Instead, increasingly the mindset is to reserve prison space for hardened criminals, the truly violent, and to “plea-deal” everyone else back to the street.
If it were that simple, it might not be as dangerous a philosophy as it is turning out to be. Instead, our prisons are populated by everyone from pot smokers to murderers, and navigating the judicial system turns out to be much more like the old television game show than it is akin to an honest “crime and punishment” scenario. To me, it is pretty simple. The punishment should fit the crime. However, in a society ever-more diverse, by our own design, there is rarely consensus on what is a “serious” crime, and what is not. Consider the recent case of the Souhegan High School in Amherst deciding that two thrill-killers should have their pictures included in the yearbook. ‘Nuff said.
Last week, an editorial in the Union Leader pointed out yet another horrendous “plea deal”. In Dover, a young man named John Wentworth had started a brawl with a complete stranger on a walking trail, not far from Central Avenue, and probably in view of other people. Richard Nolette wasn’t looking for trouble, the two were strangers, and Wentworth was about 80 pounds heavier, not unusual for “tough guys” to pick a fight with an easy target. Wentworth kicked Nolette in the head and torso, and then slammed his head into the sidewalk. Nolette was sick with AIDS at the time. A day later, Wentworth went to Nolette’s apartment looking to finish the job, but Nolette would not come outside. A day later, Richard died of head injuries.
It took a full year for Wentworth to be arrested and indicted, a travesty in and of itself. But the real travesty occurred last week when Superior Court Justice Kenneth Brown accepted a plea deal that would set Wentworth free in 18 months. Not surprisingly, many of Nolette’s family members, present in court, were outraged. Others, it is said, were satisfied with the outcome.
As a father of four boys I am confident that if one of their lives were to be taken in such a cavalier, senseless and brutal way, I would be satisfied with nothing less than the perpetrator sacrificing his or her life in exchange. That is simple and fair. I lose a son, my son loses his life…the perpetrator should match the deal. Life in prison. Yet somehow, as a society, we have come to a place where these sort of life and death negotiations are handed down everyday across the country and we don’t even bat an eye. I don’t know either family and have no stake in this beyond being astonished that as a culture we continue allow our “legal system” to dole out such mismatched doses of “justice”. Easy to pass it off when it’s not a loved one, but at some point, as a society, we may want to revisit exactly how the greater good is being served here.
And by the way, if it ever becomes a sure thing that manslaughter gets you 18 months, I expect we’ll all be seeing people being slammed, head-first, into sidewalks on a regular basis. Afterall, most of us learn as children that there are consequences for our behavior. That is what kept us from cutting the cat’s tail off with pruning shears. It will be interesting to see what changes await us as a culture as we slowly remove “consequence” from that equation.