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Judging Crimes is a blog about criminal law, violent crime and the judiciary, dedicated to making the liberal case for greater democratic control of the criminal justice system.  It's a "view from the trenches" because it's written by a practitioner, not an academic or journalist.  It examines the changing role of the judiciary in American society by looking at what judges actually do, rather than what they say.  I know what they do because I deal with the consequences every day. 

Opinions issued by judges, from Supreme Court justices on down, are justifications for the exercise of governmental power.  But it is the exercise of power itself that should command our attention, not the justifications.  Judging Crimes is concerned with the reality of judicial power rather than the verbal formulas used to defend it. 

American law professors have long liked to say they teach their students "to think like a lawyer."  Learning to think that way is a matter of internalizing certain assumptions.  The practice of judging is likewise based on a foundation of shared assumptions, among them that the United States Constitution -- a document of 8,335 words, the length of a book chapter -- provides an answer to every question.  Rather like a Ouija board.

These assumptions are so ingrained -- and their internalization is so necessary to the successful practice of law -- that most people who subscribe to them aren't even aware of having done so.  Judging Crimes will try to engage not just with the expressions of judicial power, but with the assumptions on which those expressions  rest.  

Judging Crimes won't be filled with daily entries commenting on the day's events or provide a best-of-the-web welter of links.  Many other blogs already do that, far better than I could hope to do.  (Check out these.)  Instead, Judging Crimes will contain pieces of a length that might seem long for a blog but would be short in a serious magazine.  I hope to post new pieces several times a week.

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In Our Name
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Monday
Dec122005

15. Execution Eve

Tonight America is – once again – going through a grotesque cliff's-edge, will-they-or-won't-they drama involving a celebrity prisoner.  Ann Althouse reminds us of Tookie Williams' crimes, which were about as cold as murder can get. 

This story repeats itself every few years in the America mass media, but much less frequently than executions take place.  Why do we (or "the media" that caters to us) care so much about one prisoner about to be executed, and so little about the rest of them?

When a case reaches a certain nearly-hysterical level of publicity, the public gets some sense of the experience of a sentencing judge.  The crime is long past.  The victim exists only in photographs and words, no more real than the solemn, doomed soldiers staring out of Civil War portraits.  The judge never met him, and never will, and his death cannot have made any difference to the judge's life.

But the convicted murderer stands before the judge as a person.  Murder makes its victims two-dimensional, but the convicted murderer still has the light in his eye, the characteristic way he holds his head, his gestures, his voice, his words.  The killer always has a complexity denied the victim.

When publicity reaches the saturation point with the sick drama of execution eve, we are made to think about a person whose vitality makes him so much more interesting than those who vitality he extinguished.  But then the needle is inserted, the drip is started, and the third dimension is taken from the killer, too. 

AuthorJoel Jacobsen | Comment1 Comment | | |
DateMonday, December 12, 2005 at 11:27PM in

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