 | | July 17, 2013 |  | By Jonathan V. Last | |  |  | | |  | | COLD OPEN |  |  | We're way past overload on Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman commentary, but there is a tiny tributary of the story that has been largely overlooked. And it's worth a moment because it points to a larger problem regarding both the state and the public.
The first is the modus operandi of the Florida prosecutors. I understand that overcharging may be routine in the criminal justice system. It's partly what fuels the plea bargain system, and that's what keeps the entire machine moving rather than sputtering to a broken halt. But that doesn't make it right. If the public is to have faith in the system, we need to believe that prosecutors are acting in the interests of justice. Not looking for leverage.
So how should prosecutors act? For starters, they should understand that their job is not to avenge the victim, or seek redress. Here's Joseph Bottum with an excellent explanation as to why a fixation on victims is bad legal catechesis:
All political theories note that ancient legal systems began with the outlawing of private revenge, but the state does not thereby become a sort of hired agent or substitute avenger. That is what a theory of civil harms is for, and such torts are addressed not in criminal but civil courts, where the plaintiff, not the government, collects the monetary damages. Genuine crimes, in a modern setting, are instead committed against society and its laws—just as, in medieval England, all crimes were crimes against the king. In strict legal theory, the victims are incidental; the entire body politic is injured by a crime, and the social disorder of that crime is what a government's criminal-justice system must address.
The prosecutor's job, then, is to act for the rest of society in seeking justice for social disorder. And properly understood, this job has two parts. She seeks redress for the laws that were broken. And she safeguards the rights of the citizenry—all of it, even the accused—against a misuse of power by the state. These duties might sometimes be in tension, but they are always of equal importance.
When a prosecutor overcharges, they fail in that second part of their job. It strains credulity to believe that the Florida prosecutor wasn't overcharging George Zimmerman when she sought to convict him of second-degree murder. And we care about this not because we care about Zimmerman, but because the power of the state is so awesome that it must be wielded with the utmost care.
In an important sense, both Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman are somewhat beside the point. The actions of the prosecution in this case suggest that whatever their fluency with the law, they misunderstand legal philosophy.
Not that the public has been much better. Following the verdict, defense attorney Brian Tannenbaum collected some of the outrage from Twitter and it wasn't incendiary—it was terrifyingly ignorant. For example:
@A1Black_: RT @_surlySprite: They need to APPEAL THIS VERDICT AND GO TO THE SUPREME COURT !!! Don't Stop until Justice is Served for T… @34thwarrior: Trayvon parents should appeal this to the next level @_CharNae: Trayvon Martin parents better appeal this case! I would NOT let nobody off for killing my child! HELL TF NO! @_shVn: Trayvon's parents can appeal this verdict and try to get justice again! Lets pray they do and it turns out right this time! Rip
Achieving justice in a fallen world is, if not a fool's errand, then at the very least, a task of incomprehensible difficulty. As such, our criminal justice system is highly imperfect, even in the best of times.
The Zimmerman-Martin case suggests that when both the state and the public lose sight of the ideas that animate the system, it is more imperfect than it should be.
Which should worry all of us. |  |  |  | | LOOKING BACK |  |  | "Richard Lugar of Indiana, George Voinovich of Ohio, Pete Domenici of New Mexico, and John Warner of Virginia have together served more than a century in the world's greatest deliberative body. Historians will remember their time in public office for Reagan's challenge to the Soviet Union, for the success of pro-growth economic policies, for welfare reform, for the reinvigoration of a constitutionalist approach to the courts, for the framing of a foreign policy for the post-9/11 world. None of these men played a leading role in any of these major developments. They have been followers of conventional opinion, not leaders.
"Now they are following conventional wisdom again, in their stately way, in turning against the Iraq war. They would like an exit strategy, a respectable exit strategy, along the lines of the proposals of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. They praise and embrace that group's recommendations—ignoring all the evidence that those recommendations are neither feasible nor desirable, and in any case have often been overtaken by events. Lugar, in particular, seems upset that the war in Iraq is undermining our diplomatic efforts elsewhere in the Middle East. Domenici, last Thursday, focused on the failures of the Iraqi government. Neither speaks of the fact that, in Iraq, we are fighting al Qaeda. (Domenici seems not to have mentioned al Qaeda in a conference call Thursday; Lugar mentioned al Qaeda once in his 50-minute Senate floor speech.) Nor do they discuss the fact that we are fighting a proxy war in Iraq against Iran. Nor do they see that we have a strategic interest in changing the status quo ante in the Middle East. Such considerations seem not to enter even slightly into their calculations. They are pre-9/11 Republicans."
—William Kristol, "Of Senators and Soldiers," from our July 16, 2007, issue.
Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe. | | | | |  | | THE READING LIST |  |  | Will Ayn Rand save Sears? (Spoiler Alert: No.)
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Paul Krugman is a Mean Girl.
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Inside the movie studio that gave us the Sharknado. |  | | INSTANT CLASSIC |  | | | "On Thursday the New York Times published a front-page, 1,400-word story on the political ambitions of a 26-year-old man who grew up in Ohio, graduated from Brown, married rich, and moved to New York City. And then moved to Garrison, New York, in the Hudson River Valley. And then moved to Shokan, New York, once it became clear that he couldn't win the congressional seat in Garrison. And then, should he lose next year to incumbent Republican Chris Gibson, a local Army vet who won office in 2010, will almost certainly move again. Moving around is what district-shoppers do.
"But the subject of the Times profile is no ordinary district shopper. He is Sean Eldridge, the husband of 29-year-old Facebook co-founder and Democratic donor Chris Hughes, whose net worth is somewhere in the ballpark of half-a-billion dollars."
—Matthew Continetti, Washington Free Beacon, July 12, 2013 |  |  | | THE LAST WORD |  |  | Last weekend the Wall Street Journal ran a long essay by Lee Siegel about the decline of the humanities. Siegel points to the plummeting enrollment numbers—50 years ago, 14 percent of undergrads majored literature, philosophy, classics, etc.; today only 7 percent do—and suggests that worries about this decline and what it means to the body politic are just sentimental fantasy. (His words, not mine.)
It's an interesting argument.
Siegel explains that the preeminence of the humanities the guiding star of the Western project began only in the late 19th century. Before then, it had been assumed that religion could fill that role. Once the academy brought literature under its auspices, Siegel says, the professoriate put down layers upon layer of sediment, obscuring the works themselves. The overall effect, he says, was to make literature less, rather than more, useful to the minds of students. This impulse worsened as the academy become heavily politicized. He argues that literature is, in essence, too good for the university:
Literary art's sudden, startling truth and beauty make us feel, in the most solitary part of us, that we are not alone, and that there are meanings that cannot be bought, sold or traded, that do not decay and die. This socially and economically worthless experience is called transcendence, and you cannot assign a paper, or a grade, or an academic rank, on that. Literature is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read.
I'm not sure what I make of Siegel's claim. On the one hand, I sympathize with his discomfort concerning the university, where very little good goes on these days. But on the other hand, I spent my undergraduate years toiling away in the hard sciences. (I majored in molecular biology, where the largest unit of transcendence we dealt with was a protein.. It was, as we liked to joke, biology for people who hated "life.") And I've never been able to shake the sense that I missed something—something vitally important—by ignoring the humanities in general, and literature in particular.
I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on the subject, actually.
Whatever you make of his larger thesis, Siegel includes one terribly charming story in his essay. He recounts how, during his undergraduate years at Columbia, the English department had a visiting professor every year. And every year the department listed the phone number of his office in the Manhattan White Pages under the name "Milton S. Chaucer."
Keep calm and carry on. And remember, you can always email me with tips, thoughts, etc., at editor@weeklystandard.com.
Best,
Jonathan V. Last
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