Insight
Eric the Unwashed Advocate this week thanked Norm Pattis for an “extremely insightful,” and mind-boggling, post Norm wrote a couple weeks ago about the sentencing of one of his clients. Eric’s post itself provides insight into one way in which the military justice system is more rational and just than its civilian counterpart. According to Eric, the following jury instruction is the norm in military courts:
In adjudging a sentence, you are restricted to the kinds of punishment which I will now describe or you may adjudge no punishment. There are several matters which you should consider in determining an appropriate sentence. You should bear in mind that our society recognizes five principle reasons for the sentence of those who violate the law. They are rehabilitation of the wrongdoer, punishment of the wrongdoer, protection of society from the wrongdoer, preservation of good order and discipline in the military, and deterrence of the wrongdoer and those who know of his crimes and his sentence from committing the same or similar offenses. The weight to be given any or all of these reasons, along with all other sentencing matters in this case, rests solely within your discretion.
So apparently the very same people who determine guilt in the first place, the jurors, also determine the sentence appropriate to that guilt. This way of proceeding is in fact the only way for jurors to make sense out of that other familiar and indispensable instruction, presumably also given to military jurors, which admonishes them that they must be convinced beyond a “reasonable” doubt of the defendant’s guilt in order to find him guilty.
I had meant to comment on Norm’s post too, and specifically this paragraph:
We sent him to an expert on disorders of desire. Explain if you can this errant episode in the hero’s life? The doctor reports it was mere curiosity: No libidinal clock strikes twelve at the thought of a child. For a very brief period the young man looked at pictures. Now he is in prison, a felon, required to register as a sex offender, and a member of the ostracized community of those we abhor in a schizophrenic variety of purity.
I have a confession to make. I watched one of those infamous “beheading” videos several years ago, when its awful existence on the internet was publicized all across the mainstream media. Morbid curiosity got the better of me. I shouldn’t have done it. I was horrified, if not terrorized. Wasn’t that precisely why the terrorists who’d created the video created it, and indeed committed the awful crime depicted in it? Was I contributing to the incentives for the production of more such videos by watching that one? Isn’t that the very argument used to justify punishing so rigorously and mindlessly those who’ve looked at child pornography?
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