A couple of weeks ago, a 19 year-old Ohio woman was sentenced to 15 years-to-life for the intentional murder of two young men in her car when she deliberately crashed into a wall. One was her boyfriend. The other just a passenger along for a ride.
A jury convicted her after hearing evidence that she intentionally crashed the car to kill her boyfriend — because he was about to break up with her.
“Hell hath no fury ….”
A video showed her accelerating just before she hit the wall. Yet another example of the toxic femininity I wrote about a while back.
But this column is about something else. The breakdown of societal norms.
Part of the evidence the judge and jury considered was the question she asked an investigator, who told her she was being charged with murder and could go to prison. “Can’t you just take my license away for 10 years or something like that?”
Her question reminded me of when I prosecuted two young men back in the ‘90s for First Degree murder. They killed a mutual acquaintance over a dispute about a small amount of marijuana.
As often occurs in cases where multiple defendants are facing life imprisonment for murder, one wanted a plea deal for a reduced sentence to testify against the other. From the perspective of a prosecutor there are a number of complex factors which go into the decision whether to agree to such a plea deal.
The primary factor is the relative culpability of the defendants for the killing. In this instance we made the deal because the other defendant’s actions were far worse — and having “co-defendant testimony” solidified our case against him.
What my 1996 case has to do with the one last week in Ohio is this: During my conversations with the “co-operating defendant” about the sentence (21 years) he would receive for testifying, he asked me, “Why can’t I just go to counseling for while?”
He was serious.
By that stage of my prosecutorial career I wasn’t surprised by anything criminals say… but that struck me. This guy was not a street thug like many of the murderers I encountered who would have understood what a great deal he was getting. He was a chemistry major in college with a socio-economic background similar to my own.
But, unlike me, he had grown up during the height of the misguided “self-esteem” era described in The Coddling of the American Mind. The concept of punishment for bad conduct was not part of his life experience. I introduced him to the real world.
He actually believed “counseling” was what he should get for holding the victim — while his co-defendant beat the victim with a pipe, and used a knife to carve his initials into the victim’s neck.. The disconnect between actions, and consequences, in our society is profound.
That disconnect is becoming public policy. For example, retail theft is endemic. It’s gotten so bad in San Francisco that retailers are leaving the city en mass.
California law has raised the minimum dollar-amount threshold ($1,000) of what constitutes theft. Unless you steal that amount, it’s not really theft — it’s just “redistribution of wealth”.
I’m not being facetious. The underlying rational appears to be: the thieves need the merch more than the rightful owners. The drug-addicted homeless need it more than the store proprietors. So it’s OK for the addicts to appropriate it from them.
In his Noble Prize winning exposé of the Stalinist criminal “justice” system — The Gulag Archipelago — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn details how common thieves received preferential treatment from the system compared to the harsh treatment meted out to political dissenters. Under Soviet-style communism, conformance to ideology prevailed over private property.
That’s how it is now in San Francisco. Compare the olly-olly-in-free attitude toward thievery versus how officials there react to “misgendering” .
And it’s not limited to San Francisco. Other areas across the nation are decaying due to crime — and the failure of public officials to do anything about it.
In 2020, there was rampant widespread rioting, with massive destruction of private property — and the only person prosecuted was a young man defending himself from the rioters.
And what was the media-fueled origin of that rioting? The death of George Floyd.
There was no justification for Floyd’s death — caused by the negligence of a police officer. But neither was there any justification for making Floyd a hero. He was a habitual criminal – killed while under the influence of drugs as he was being arrested for an alleged felony. Yet he was virtually canonized by the rioters — and the media.
Another example of the celebration of a habitual criminal was the recent appearance, on the Fox show ‘Gutfeld’, of Rayanna Brock, whose claim to fame is grinning in a series of mugshots.
Brock’s criminality has enabled her to achieve the dream job of members of her narcissistic generation — to become a social media “influencer”? Crime does pay!
So we now have at environment in which a 19-year-old woman murders her boyfriend, and an innocent bystander, then expects to be punished by only loss of her driver’s license for a while “or something like that” — as if she merely came home past curfew.
History suggests that it’s going to get worse. This is how societies collapse.
Gary Beatty lives between Florida and Pagosa Springs. He retired after 30 years as a prosecutor for the State of Florida, has a doctorate in law, is Board Certified in Criminal Trial law by the Florida Supreme Court, and is now a law professor.