Subject: Fwd: "When Human Life Is Cheap" -- New Commentary by Patricia Nell Warren
From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 11:44:03 -0500

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NEWS YOU DIDN'T SEE ON TV

A commentary by Patricia Nell Warren                      
10/30/96

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WHEN HUMAN LIFE IS CHEAP: Frontier Justice in the Nineties
By Patricia Nell Warren

I used to think that Dan White's sentence was the benchmark for
holding a human life cheap.  This elected official loaded a handgun and
went to San Francisco city hall with a "High Noon" kind of murder in his
heart.  He shot to death not one but two fellow  politicians: gay supervisor
Harvey Milk and San Francisco mayor George Moscone. For two killings, 
White got 7 years, and was out in five. 

But the other day, in Tennessee, Judge Doug Meyer opened a new frontier
in the cheapening of life.  He sentenced Adriana Blair Butler to 30 days in
jail for shooting her mother's  lover in the head.  Thirty days...count them.
The judge opted for leniency because, he said, there had been provocation.
(After all, the mother's lover  was a lesbian.)
 
These days, it  is easy to list the lenient sentences, or verdicts of "not
guilty," for people who commit violent crimes against gay youth and gay
adults. As the "Jenny Jones" murder trial moves ahead, America wonders
if Jonathan Schmitz  can make his gay victim  look nasty enough to get off.
 If
so, another blow will be struck at the value of life.  

But there's a bigger  problem here. These bargain-basement reductions on the
price of  life are affecting many Americans equally.

Today there is a widening gap between actual sentencing and what might
be called punishment appropriate for the crime. Somehow, our whole system of
justice has gotten dangerously twisted.  Legislators, law officers, judges
and juries don't just  downsize penalties when it suits them (especially
when it gets a white man off). They upsize penalties as well.  In the last
decade, there are whole rafts of new federal, state and local laws that
criminalize actions once legal.  Misdemeanors can be upgraded to
felonies.  Counts are compounded, adding up to lots of time. While both
political
parties make loud speeches about putting away serial killers and sexual
predators, legislators are quietly putting away  ordinary people and
first-time offenders for things like driving without a license.  The
criminalization of smoking and being HIV positive  will be a windfall for the
prison system.  In several states, new  "three strikes" laws propose to make
crimes like prostitution a reason for life behind bars without parole.

Unthinking citizens who cheer "get tough" crime policy are simply not
noticing the growing erosion of  American life by this broaded definition of
"crime"  -- in, say, the low-income West Virginia  family who must pay a
staggering $5000 fine because their kid got caught doing one graffiti.

In the territories of the old West, people were commonly  hung for stealing a
horse.  If you were a black slave or Chinese or native American, you could be
hung for the fun of it.  Life was cheap on the frontier.  Stakes were high,
with vast land and wealth there for the taking.  Law and order was thin, and
often operated freely off personal bigotry and greed. Today, with our country
so overcrowded and overheated, with a punitive spirit riding high, life is
cheap again and  we're sliding back into frontier justice.  There are not
only the old  bigotries and greeds to contend with, like those which sentence
people of color to more time for the same crime.  There is also a spooky new
bureaucratic drive to monitor and control people's every action, and punish
them harshly for all kinds of minor offenses. The U.S. has the largest prison
population on earth, with 1 million people behind bars, and this is due as
much to first offenses and victimless crime as it is to serial killers and
drug dealers. 

Murder and manslaughter sentences are a good way to measure  the falling
value of human life.  With killer Butler's 30 days in mind, I pondered these
sentences in the recent news:

Item: a California grandmother in her 60s was arrested for helpfully putting
money in somebody's meter that had expired. She had no idea that this is now 
illegal. Grandma could get 4 months in jail -- four times longer than Butler.

Item: In Los Angeles, a homeless person now gets six months in jail for
sleeping on the sidewalk, and another six months for stealing aluminum cans
and other valuable recyclables from trash.  Similar new laws target homeless 
all over the country.  

Item: six months in jail for killing and eating a dog -- laws that 
target Asian immigrants with different culinary traditions.

Item: an 11-year-old South Carolina honor student with a clean record
was actually arrested and sentenced to a year's probation for breaking a
state law about  weapons in school.  She took a steak knife in her lunch box
to cut her
chicken with.(Gosh, where was the kind of  leniency that handed 30 days to
killer Butler?)

Indeed, kids' lives are dirt cheap,  as the lynch-mob mentality rides ever
higher. 
Kids are subject to new criminalizations that
would drive adults to riot -- from suspicionless drug-testing to  repressive
curfew laws.  In Camden, N.J., kids age 6-17 are arrested if they're found on
the street during school hours.   Minors are more often prosecuted as adults,
with
those who kill  being targeted for life sentences.  Minors can be  jailed
merely
on the parents' request, or by a judge, to "teach them a lesson".  Parents
are held cheap, too -- California parents can be jailed for a year, and fined
$2500, for failing to control their children. Statistics already reveal the
stark fact that "getting tough" often turns a youthful offender into a
hardened, angry
adult repeater.   

The question must be asked:  Why is  frontier justice  in the saddle again?

More than misguided demands for "more morality," it is "more money"
that drives  this trend. "Gold in them thar hills" translates  into prisons
as the
hot new growth industry. Job-hungry communities lure new prisons the way they
used to lure industry.  Massive fines, lawyers fees, jail and prison costs
per prisoner, the privatizing of prison construction and operation,  the
growing power of prison guards' unions, all are creating new funding, cash
flow and pork in a starved economy.  Just as the old West suffered serious
damage from out-of-control mining and logging, so our spiritual and economic
landscape is eroding seriously, as more and more ordinary citizens are caught
in the toils of sentencing inequities, and their rage and cynicism builds.

It  is no wonder that more and more Americans today have less and less
respect for the law.

As for Adriana Butler, she is lucky that she put a bullet in somebody's head.
If she had put a quarter in somebody's parking meter, she might have done 4
times the time.

Patricia Nell Warren is author of "The Front Runner" and other bestselling 
books, as well as a widely published commentator.  Her publisher is Wildcat
Press, 8306 Wilshire Blvd. Box 8306, Beverly Hills, CA 90211. 
Copyright (c) 1996 by Patricia Nell Warren. All Rights Reserved. 

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