How journalists could transform public perceptions about criminal justice

Simply report the cost of the corrections system with the same breathlessness that they report the cost of the welfare system. This story is via Stuff, my additions in italics:

The controversial “three strikes” legislation has seen a young man jailed without parole and warned that if he steals another skateboard, hat or cellphone he will spend 14 years behind bars at a minimum cost to the taxpayer of $1.6 million dollars. 

In issuing Elijah Akeem Whaanga, 21, his second strike, Judge Tony Adeane told the Hastings man his two “street muggings” that netted “trophies of minimal value” meant his outlook was now “bleak in the extreme”.

“When you next steal a hat or a cellphone or a jacket or a skateboard you will be sent to the High Court and there you will be sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment without parole.” Judge Adeane said.

[Whaanga] committed two aggravated robberies with two separate accomplices.

The first involved taking a skateboard, hat and cigarette lighter from the victim after trying unsuccessfully to remove the victim’s jacket. The second involved Whaanga kicking the victim in the back of his leg and taking his hat and cellphone.

Justice Minister Judith Collins said the case showed the law was working. Sensible Sentencing Trust spokesman Garth McVicar agreed, saying the sentence of two-and-a-half years’ jail with no parole at a cost to the taxpayer of $300,000 was “fantastic”.

It’s a nice illustration of how dumb it is for politicians like Judith Collins to showboat with the justice system by legislating away judge’s ability to decide sentences. It doesn’t matter if Whaanga beats someone so badly he sends them to hospital or just tries to pull their jacket off them, the sentence is the same. 14 years.

What (I think) Garth McVicar is trying to say

As we all know:

Crime will rise if gay couples are allowed to marry, says the head of the country’s victim lobby group.

Sensible Sentencing Trust leader Garth McVicar has submitted to Parliament that changing the law to allow same-sex marriage will be yet another erosion of basic morals and values in society which have led to an escalation of child abuse, domestic violence, and an ever-increasing prison population.

“The marriage amendment bill will not benefit society at all and will ultimately have detremetal (sic) effect on crime at all levels,” the submission read.

This is part of a broader argument popular amongst US conservatives. It goes like this: take a look at a chart showing violent crime in the US since 1960.

So something happened in the 1960s to cause a staggering increase in violent crime, which then dropped sharply in the 1990s. The conservative argument is that the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s happened. People abandoned traditional values of family, religion, hard work, ect, and that caused society to crumble. It uncrumbled a bit in the 1990s, because of Reagan. Moreover, they’d argue that groups which have held onto these values are less prone to divorce, crime, and groups like minorities and poor whites who don’t uphold traditional values are poorer and cause many more social problems than people who are married, hard-working, religious etc. Gay marriage is not a traditional family value, hence legalising gay-marriage will lead to a crime wave.

There are plenty of alternative theories. The Superfreakonomics guys who think legalised abortion led to lower crime. The newest theory is that lead exposure is a causative factor in violent crime:

There may also be a medical reason for the decline in crime. For decades, doctors have known that children with lots of lead in their blood are much more likely to be aggressive, violent and delinquent. In 1974, the Environmental Protection Agency required oil companies to stop putting lead in gasoline. At the same time, lead in paint was banned for any new home (though old buildings still have lead paint, which children can absorb).

Tests have shown that the amount of lead in Americans’ blood fell by four-fifths between 1975 and 1991. A 2007 study by the economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes contended that the reduction in gasoline lead produced more than half of the decline in violent crime during the 1990s in the U.S. and might bring about greater declines in the future. Another economist, Rick Nevin, has made the same argument for other nations.

I’d genuinely like to know what McVicar thinks of this theory, and if he’d be in favor of more stringent government regulation on the use of heavy metals in industry.

Fisher Binnie Idiot’s Summary (I am the idiot)

My initial take is:

Binnie: Was asked to advise Cabinet on whether he thought David Bain was innocent on the balance of probabilities. Binnie has not concluded that Bain was innocent ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ or guilty on the basis of the evidence, because – he argues – the police investigation against him was so incompetent that guilt or evidence could not be determined, and the initial prosecution should not have taken place. Due to these ‘extraordinary circumstances’ Bain can be said to be innocent in a legal sense. Binnie feels that due to actions by the New Zealand police and judiciary there has been a miscarriage of justice against David Bain and that the state should compensate Bain for this.

Fisher: Argues that Binnie wasn’t asked to determine whether there were extraordinary circumstances, or whether the justice system should pay restitution to Bain because of the way it handled the case. It asked him to weigh the evidence and determine his guilt or innocence on the balance of probabilities.

Small thought experiment

Every now and then, teachers or members of the public service make stupid mistakes, or break the law and get caught. Now, wouldn’t it be weird if every time that happened, the head of the PPTA or the Public Service Union came out fighting in their defense and argued that members or their union should be completely unaccountable and above the law?

The reason I ask is because that’s the perennial position of Greg O’Connor, head of the Police Association. This time around the police organised crime unit defrauded a district court during an investigation into a gang, forcing the judge to drop charges against 21 gang members. O’Connor is outraged . . . at the judge.

Flotsam or iceberg?

Graeme Edgeler overviews the extant issues in the Dotcom case and concludes:

is it a function of the Police to intercept the communications of people in respect of offences that they themselves cannot get interception warrants?

As a lawyer, I could comfortably argue that the actions of the GCSB, as I understand them to be, would have been with the scope of the GCSB Act had none of the Kim Dotcom and his colleagues been permanent residents.

People make mistakes. People misunderstand questions, or misunderstand the answers they are given to their questions. They assume other people have conducted the necessary checks, or obtained the right permissions. Such mistakes may rise to the level of incompetence, or even be criminal. We’ll get some information later in the week about how the the GCSB found themselves illegally intercepting the communications of a couple of New Zealand residents.

But short of someone in the GCSB acting as some sort of rogue agent, how that breach happened is not actually our biggest problem. The actions of the Police in using the GCSB as an end-run around laws we have put in place deliberately limiting police powers are of much greater concern.

It does seem to me that high profile cases involving police and intelligence gathering have a tendency to reveal either unethical behavior or downright illegality on the part of the authorities. To turn it all into a clumsy metaphor, I wonder if this is flotsam – ie when they’re dealing with a high profile case the complexity throws up uncharacteristic instances of poor judgment; or is this the tip of the ol’ iceberg: do the authorities break the laws around surveillance on a routine basis, but it only becomes apparent in high-profile cases involving clever lawyers, political oversight and media scrutiny?

Let that be a lesson to you

Stuff reports:

Convicted Bridgecorp director Peter Steigrad is holidaying in Europe despite being only part way through a nine-month home detention sentence.

Steigrad filed an appeal against his sentence after serving just seven weeks of home detention and returned to his home in Sydney on bail in early July where his ill wife is based.

He has now taken the opportunity of bail to, with court approval, attend his daughter’s two weddings on either side of the English Channel.

Steigrad’s ill wife has also travelled to the wedding despite the appeal being based on the humanitarian grounds that he wanted to move closer to her in Sydney because she cannot travel to New Zealand to be with him.

Punishment in the criminal justice system is supposed to have an element of deterrence: the theory is that people make a rational decision when they decide to commit a crime, and if the risk of punishment outweighs the perceived reward they don’t break the law.

Most law-breakers tend to be desperate, or stupid, or drunk or on drugs, or suffering from mental-illness, so the deterrence theory doesn’t really work – except in the case of white-collar criminals, who are in a position to make a rational decision to break the law. Call me a blood-thirsty old tricoteuse, but I don’t think the threat of imprisoning these people in their mansions for several months and only letting them out to go on holiday to Europe is an adequate deterrence.

(I note that the Sensible Sentencing Trust has yet to comment on this issue.)

What then?

Jacinda Ardern has a column in the Herald about child abuse (she is opposed to it) and it asserts:

There will be those parents who have already proven time and again that they should not have the privilege and responsibility of raising another child. They are not the norm, but for them our response should be swift and simple – they don’t get to gamble with another child’s life.

I don’t care if this is seen as too interventionist. I’d rather that than more of the “waiting and seeing”.

I’m all for interventionism, but I do wonder how this would work. How do you stop abusive parents from having more children?

The first stage seems pretty simple. You introduce a mechanism in which CYFS or other authorities can red-flag individuals who abuse their children, presumably through some sort of judicial process. But how do you monitor men who have been red-flagged to see if they’re living in a house with children, or expecting another child with a new partner? Pregnant women will get picked up when they enter the health system, but red-flagged males will be harder. Do you need something similar to the sex-offender registry? (It might be a good idea to combine the two, sending the message that child abuse carries the same level of stigma.)

Say you do – what happens once you’ve flagged someone? You can offer them medical sterilisation, but you can’t compel them to accept it – even offering financial incentives takes you into very tricky ethical territory, especially since a huge proportion of those sterilised would be Maori. You run into the same problems with abortion, only more-so.

So do you remove children from the parents’ care at birth? That is, in itself, a form of child abuse, so the threshold for such an act would have to be very high. And where do they go? One of the main reasons we have the Domestic Purposes Benefit is that state agencies and religious organisations proved themselves dangerously inept at caring for and raising children. Are they adopted? Adopted children also face a horribly high rate of child abuse.

It’s very easy to say ‘some parents shouldn’t be allowed to have children’, but very hard to implement that sentiment as policy.

Documentaries and criminal justice

The New York Times reports on the release of the West Memphis Three:

After nearly two decades in prison for the murder of three young boys, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr., commonly known as the West Memphis Three, stood up in a courtroom here on Friday, proclaimed their innocence even as they pleaded guilty, and, minutes later, walked out as free men.

The freeing of Mr. Echols, 36, was the highest-profile release of a death row inmate in recent memory. Mr. Baldwin, 34, and Mr. Misskelley, 36, had been serving life sentences.

. .

It was May 1993 when the nude bodies of three 8-year-old boys, Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch and Michael Moore, were found in a drainage canal in Robin Hood Hills, a wooded area in the poor Arkansas town of West Memphis. The bodies appeared to have been mutilated, and their hands were tied to their feet.

The grotesque nature of the murders, coming in the midst of a nationwide concern about satanic cult activity, especially among teenagers, led investigators from the West Memphis Police Department to focus on Mr. Echols, a troubled yet gifted 18-year-old who wore all black, listened to heavy metal music and considered himself a Wiccan. Efforts to learn more about him through a woman cooperating with the police led to Mr. Misskelley, a 17-year-old acquaintance of Mr. Echols’s.

After a nearly 12-hour police interrogation, Mr. Misskelley confessed to the murders and implicated Mr. Echols and Mr. Baldwin, who was 16 at the time, though his confession diverged in significant details, like the time of the murders, with the facts known by the police. Mr. Misskelley later recanted, but on the strength of that confession he was convicted in February 1994.

The fear of satanic cults abusing children was a moral panic that swept the west during the 1990s – the most famous domestic example was the trial of Peter Ellis in Christchurch. It’s horrible to think there are still people serving prison sentences because of a mass-hysteria from two decades ago.

As the Times story mentions, the West Memphis Three became prominent after the release of the documentary film Paradise Lost. Watching this movie is an amazing, horrible experience, as it quickly becomes apparent that the three teenagers on trial are not guilty – but someone is, and the film draws attention to the step-father of one of the murdered children, who we then learn has a long history of violent crime. Then this individual gives a knife with blood on it as ‘a present’ to the film-makers. Then they hand it over to the police for testing and it tests positive for his step-son’s blood . . .

The movie has haunted me for years, and I checked for updates on the WM3′s appeal cases every few months, and progress was non-existent, so it’s thrilling to suddenly hear that they’re free.

On the subject, the directors who made Paradise Lost also made a movie called Some Kind of Monster, which is about Metallica and is a great movie even if, like me, you don’t much like Metallica. And, of course, the Errol Morris movie The Thin Blue Line is also about a murder trial and is arguably the most influential documentary ever made.

Sharon Armstrong

The HoS reports:

Jailed Kiwi Sharon Armstrong knew she was carrying a secret parcel in a hidden compartment in her suitcase – but she is adamant she had no idea the parcel contained drugs.

In the interview yesterday, the former Wellington civil servant said she was tricked into believing she was taking a top secret business contract to a man in London that she had been dating online for six months.

Are we to believe Armstrong – who is a former parole officer – really thought she was carrying a ‘secret contract’ in her suitcase? Pretty doubtful.

Back when I were a lad travelling around Asia and the Middle-east there was a scam going around in which backpackers agreed to smuggle ‘gemstones’ back Europe or the US for a split of the profits and if you agreed you were given a suitcase supposedly containing gemstones which was actually packed full of Pakistani heroin.

Compulsion

It sounds like there’s a whole Truman Capote novel(?!) going on in the background of the Scott Guy murder. I am fascinated by homicide investigations: when I was in my early twenties I read a big stack of books on behavioural profiling, and my flatmate Steve, who had a similar interest, read them too. During this binge the Hope-Smart disappearance happened in the Malborough Sounds, and Steve and I wrote psychological profiles of the probable killer and actually intended to forward them to the police, until our other flatmate John-Paul pointed out that in all of our books they stressed that compulsive killers liked to interject themselves into police investigations, and that we also fit our own profiles in several other ways too unflattering to repeat here, at which point we decided the police investigation could get by without us.

Anyway, I’ve long had this theory that the police had a strong suspicion as to who Guy’s killers were, and had them under surveillance but they no proof, so most of their public statements on the case have been aimed at provoking the suspects into incriminating themselves.