Tag Archives: Criminal Justice

Hearing Amanda Knox

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Amanda Knox has again been found guilty of Meredith Kercher’s murder in Perugia, Italy, four years ago. Fortunately, she has no plans to visit Italy again. It also seems highly unlikely that she will ever be extradited, given the highly questionable evidence in the case and the way in which she has been treated by the Italian criminal justice system. It’s worth repeating that there was no physical evidence implicating her, the prosecution couldn’t come up with a motive and she (a 19-year old in a foreign country) was pressured into confessing.

A few months ago, I wrote a few posts about my experience as a prospective juror in a criminal trial (not murder, just insurance fraud). For some reason, people (or computer programs) kept accessing those posts as the months went by. Maybe it was because I expressed some relatively “non-liberal” opinions about our own legal system. But cases like Amanda Knox’s should make us wonder how often innocent people confess or plead guilty in order to stop their interrogations or get a shorter sentence.

In a similar vein, it’s amazing how often our legal system plods along, refusing to respond when new evidence comes out showing that someone in prison was wrongly convicted. It’s as if the judges and prosecutors are more committed to defending their earlier decisions and victories than in serving justice (maybe that shouldn’t be amazing at all). That’s one of the points Amanda Knox makes in a recent interview she gave to the Guardian (the video is available here). Some in the British press were especially merciless in depicting her as a sex-crazed nut job. I hope this interview gets widespread attention. It shows her in a very different light.

Some of This News Is Related (and We’re All Another Day Older)

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The Wayne County (Michigan) prosecutor has charged 54-year old Theodore Wafer of Dearborn Heights with second-degree murder, manslaughter and illegal possession of a firearm. He shot Renisha McBride in the face after she crashed her car on his street at 2 a.m. and came to his house, apparently looking for help.

At least one semi-facetious observer recently suggested a link between this kind of thing and the end of the world as we know it. On a related topic – what we’re doing to the planet – a leaked report from a U.N. commission predicts that climate change will reduce the global food supply in coming years, while the world’s population grows (albeit at a declining rate) and the demand for food increases.

An ex-soldier writing in the New York Times accepts the idea that we’ve entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, a concept some scientists have adopted in order to reflect the massive effects we’re having on the planet. The ex-soldier argues that we should think of our civilization as already being dead, just like he used to think of himself as already dead when he was stationed in Iraq. Maybe he’s right and a more fatalistic attitude toward the effects of climate change would make us behave differently. We might go calmly about our business and make lots of necessary changes. On the other hand, we might do even less than we’re doing now.

There is also quite a big difference between one particular soldier dealing with the next few hours of his life and 200 nations composed of 7 billion people doing something about the next 100 years. Global climate change is, after all, a perfect example of “the problem of the commons”, i.e. “the depletion of a shared resource by individuals, acting independently and rationally according to each one’s self-interest, despite their understanding that depleting the common resource is contrary to the group’s long-term best interests” (Wikipedia). An economist writing in the American Economic Review admits that:

as the US and other economies have grown, the carrying capacity of the planet—in regard to both natural resources and environmental quality—has become a greater concern….While small communities frequently provide modes of oversight and methods for policing their citizens…, commons problems have spread across communities and even across nations. In some of these cases, no overarching authority can offer complete control, rendering common problems more severe.

Yet he concludes that “economics is well-positioned to offer better understanding and better policies to address these ongoing challenges” (maybe he felt the need for an upbeat ending).

Still, the U.N. Climate Change Conference is underway in Warsaw. There are people advocating for a steady-state economy in which population growth and the use of natural resources are limited. A group of eminent scientists recently said that the “evidence indicating that our civilisation has already caused significant global warming is overwhelming”, but it’s still possible to limit the increase to a sustainable 2 degrees Centigrade if we act quickly. 

Meanwhile, China has just decided to remove its restriction on city-dwellers having more than one child, which will mean another million or two young Chinese every year, and Japan is substantially cutting its greenhouse gas reduction target in order to compensate for shutting down its nuclear power plants.

In other news, Andy Kaufman is, unfortunately, still dead.

Should He Be Free? Are Any of Us?

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Some news stories generate more than their share of questions. At least in my mind.

Like this one:

Clifford Jacobson, 55, of Franklin, New Jersey, has been arrested for calling the 911 emergency number when there was no emergency. This is the third time he’s been arrested for the same offense:

In the latest incident, Jacobson called 911 at about 5 p.m. Saturday…. When Franklin police arrived at his house, Jacobson “related that he had no emergency to report and that he had a feeling in his heart to call 911″. Police said they have responded to similar calls from Jacobson on more than 30 occasions. Jacobson continues to call 911, even though he has been given the non-emergency police number in numerous instances… Jacobson has been sent to the Somerset County Jail in lieu of $10,000 bail.

I’m wondering what Mr. Jacobson says when he calls 911. Does he make up an emergency or say nothing at all? What compels the police to keep going to his house? Has Mr. Jacobson been treated for what appears to be a symptom of mental illness? Or is he just very lonely? Why was Mr. Jacobson able to call 911 twenty-seven times without being arrested? When Mr. Jacobson is arrested, does he get to make a phone call? Does he call 911? If he spends time in jail, will he have access to a pay phone?

I’m not above making a joke or two at Mr. Jacobson’s expense, but unless he simply enjoys annoying the police department, this is a sad story. It sounds like he is an excellent candidate for treatment, not incarceration. I hope his story has a happy ending.

Coincidentally, I read about Mr. Jacobson after watching a YouTube lecture on free will. The philosopher who delivered the lecture, Derk Pereboom, argues that we don’t have free will — everything we do is fixed by the previous state of the universe, by either deterministic or statistical laws. Looking back at our lives, in the circumstances we found ourselves, we could never have done anything other than what we actually did.

Professor Pereboom concludes that we should take our lack of free will into account when we react to other people’s behavior (or our own). For example, it makes no sense for the police to be angry at Mr. Jacobson – even if they can’t help themselves, since they don’t have free will. It’s fine to stop him from interfering with the 911 number, but the only justification for punishing or treating him is to change his behavior (or the behavior of people like him), not to cause him unnecessary pain or to dehumanize him.

Philosophers and theologians in the West have been thinking and arguing about free will for more than 2000 years. I’ve only been thinking about it for 40 years, so it isn’t surprising that I haven’t written the definitive paper on the topic. (Keep an eye on this space, however!)

For now, I’ll merely say that Professor Pereboom, although a respected authority, is in the minority of academic philosophers on this topic. Most of his fellow professors believe that we do have free will, even if our actions are always determined. But I agree with Pereboom. Our actions aren’t free in an important sense. The standard view of personal responsibility is mistaken.

Nevertheless, I find it almost impossible to behave differently based on this apparent fact. For example, it should be easier for me to excuse myself for past mistakes now that I doubt the existence of free will, but that hasn’t been the case so far. And when I need to make a decision, it’s not as if I can sit quietly, waiting for the universe to tell me what to do. How would I even know when the universe had spoken?

Still, maybe that’s what we do when we make a decision. We wait a second, an hour or a year, considering our options, and then discover what we’re going to end up doing. We think we’re choosing among real alternatives, but it’s really the universe doing the “choosing” for us. After all, we’re made of the same stuff that makes up everything else. Everything in us is subject to the universe’s laws – we’re carried along by the course of events, whether we know it or not. 

If Mr. Jacobson thinks about free will, maybe he’ll reach the same conclusion.

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The story about Mr. Jacobson:  franklin_twp_man_charged_for_third_time

Professor Pereboom’s 45-minute lecture:
youtube.com/watch?v=bObzpWrhH-Q

PS — Was the title of the movie Free Willy an intentional pun?Â