My wife had the honor of jury duty this week and became one of the many people that get turned away because they don't match the thinking of the prosecution or defense. Of course, she has gotten further in the process than I ever have. Given that, the case she might have sat on is one of the many that cause of us to rethink the ways our laws and punishments work. I know many of you are way ahead of me here, but I will walk through this slowly because it really can help us in rethinking how we define crime.
I think we would all agree with the general premise in that for a crime to take place there must be an aggressor (or criminal) and a victim(s). The aggressor is the person that commits the crime and the victim or victims are the people that suffer the negative consequences of said crime. I think that is simple enough and where we can jump off from. So, the question at hand is who is the criminal and who is the victim in the case of prostitution. My wife was serving on a case where a woman working in a massage parlor was accused of rendering different services to her customers.
These are often called victimless crimes, but I think the way these cases are prosecuted reflect where our society has gone. If you consider the physical and psychological affects of this act then we are prosecuting the wrong people. We all know that being a jon is also illegal. However, how many times do we hear about prominent "clients" getting off and prominent "independent retailers" going to jail? Exactly who is the victim here? The client is getting what they paid for. The retailer in many instances gets raped, beaten, or degraded in the process of rendering services.
In the case of immigrant workers, many are paid substandard wages without adequate benefits or protection should they be hurt on the job. Yet, who does our government target? That's right, the worker. Sure, they are guilty of illegal immigration and we don't want to gloss over that fact too much, but you have a business that is fully taking advantage of that and they are being lauded, not prosecuted for their role.
Finally, we get to the specter of drugs and the so-called drug war. You have drug dealer and drug user. Who is the victim? Who goes to jail most often? In actuality both are victims in a lot of cases. Many dealers deal as a way to support their own habit. Therefore, when we look at all these cases combined we see a lot of victims behind bars. Naturally, some folks will cringe at the suggestion that these folks shouldn't go to prison, but I always thought prison was a place where we put bad people to protect the rest of us. Is a pothead a bad person? Is a prostitute a bad person. Is an undocumented worker trying to support his or her family a bad person? I suppose an argument could be made for that.
I offer the counter argument that in many cases the people that are their so-called victims are actually worse people than they. In the cases of drugs, there are no good guys or bad guys at all. In such cases, the justice system is really not the right avenue to deal with these issues. The world would be better without people having to sell their bodies, sell drugs, or sell their labor for substandard rates. The justice system is not always the best avenue to solve these worldly dilemmas for us. Moreover, as much as we may hate Lindsay Lohan and how she has been allowed to break the law over and over, do we really want her holding down a cell that could go to someone more dangerous?
The role of a jury, and each individual juror, we are told is not to decide whether or not the law is a good one, only whether or not the evidence presented by the prosecution is sufficient to remove all but a reasonable doubt that the accursed did, in fact, behave in a manner which is not allowed. But then there is the phenomenon of jury nullification where the jury decides that -- the evidence notwithstanding -- the accursed should not be convicted. And since our system requires unanimous agreement by the jury, a single juror can (unlike a Congressvarmint) vote their conscience regardless of what anyone else thinks. That being the case, it behooves us all to be jurors when called upon to serve.
hmmm, interesting...