Jurisprudence

May 15 2020

You are presumed innocent

before a court of law.

Which doesn't mean others

aren't free to judge.

Or shame, exclude, ignore;

because even the uninformed

get to bring down a verdict

settle personal scores.

While guilt is all your own

private holding cell.

Which no one else can make you feel

or free you of.

Forgiveness is trickier.

Is it yours to ask of another?

A mercy to confer?

A gift to yourself?

The shameless, of course

don't trouble themselves.

If only they were self-aware

instead of incorrigible,

could tell right from wrong

took conscience to heart.

As if we weren't all irredeemably flawed;

because there, but for the grace of God

go us all.

I have never studied law,

but I know justice

and when it isn't served.

The sentencing

the reckoning

the pettiness of rules,

the punishing

for penitence

by the revengeful and the cruel.

When, in the best of all possible worlds

we would be better off making amends,

humbly accepting

lessons learned.

And know injustice, as well.

That good people suffer

instead of scoundrels and thugs.

That the undeserving are punished

by the heedless gods

and providence

and the fickle odds of fate,

while bad actors flourish

and the venal merely squirm.

No burning in hell

no heavenly choir

no earthly paradise.

Just random chance

and fallible gods

and your usual humdrum vice.

Condemned to life

for petty crime

and time already served.

I've been watching a brilliant series called Rectify. It was originally broadcast on Sundance in 2014 or so, and is available on Netflix. It's about a convicted murderer released after 20 years on death row because of new DNA evidence. It also emerges that his confession may have been coerced. So while his sentence has been vacated, his status is uncertain. As is his guilt. Perhaps even to himself. He rejoins his somewhat complicated family and small town Georgia community after having been confined in a small featureless cell since he was 18. His life experience comes mostly from books. He is intelligent, witty, charismatic ...but damaged, and compellingly inscrutable. That's all I'll say.

So after watching this for several consecutive nights, I suppose these issues have been busily fermenting in my subconscious. Ideas about guilt and shame and ostracism, about justice and injustice, about memory and truth. Rectify probably informed my opening few lines. After that, I let my fingers on the keyboard follow more of a stream of consciousness than any kind of outline or end point. So the poem doesn't tell a story. It doesn't reach a conclusion. But I hope it isn't incoherent, has its own internal logic, and provokes the reader to both think and feel.

I think forgiveness is all that: a mercy you can confer ...something you can ask for, as long as you have met all the criteria of apology and amends ...and a gift to yourself. Because at some point, you can only move on if you forgive yourself And forgiving others is your gift, as well. Because it's proffered not so much for their sake as it is for yours: to free yourself of the burden of anger, resentment, injustice. This forgiveness doesn't have to offered, and doesn't depend on being accepted. Simply by having been given, it lets you wipe the mental slate clean.

This isn't a political poem, but I have to admit that I was thinking of Donald Trump – as well as all his hypocritical and shameless lackeys, enablers, and sycophants – when I wrote that stanza about shamelessness. His lack of empathy and self-awareness; pathological narcissism; inveterate lying; ability to conjure alternate realities, and then actually believe in them; and his reflexive self-justification all make him immune to shame. He is incorrigible, and should be barred for life from public office.

Shame, of course, comes from outside. It's our primary means of social control and social harmony. We feel it. It doesn't have to be legislated and proclaimed. Guilt, on the other, is internal. We can choose either to feel it or not. It can be justified and necessary – an act of conscience. Or it can be a self-imposed burden: out of proportion, or even untrue.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After the first draft of this poem was shared with one of my readers, he wrote back about, among other things, Weregild. I responded by elaborating on some of the themes of the poem, as well as with some of my thoughts about crime and punishment in general. Here is that email (slightly edited):

As I said, compassion comes from the humility implied in "there but for the grace ...":  that, given circumstances or accident of birth, we are all susceptible to making one very bad decision. 

In terms of punishment, 2 things come to mind. 

One, what sense does it make to judge a person by the worst thing they ever did on the worst day of their life? If you or I were to be judged that way, people would see us in a very bad light indeed; and one – based on how we stigmatize ex-cons – that we could never for the rest of our lives be free of! 

 ...And two, people are sent to prison AS punishment, not FOR punishment. The loss of freedom is the penalty. After that, they should be treated as wayward members who will some day return to society. The Finnish philosophy and practice of corrections is an admirable one. We should emulate. (Although I don't deny that there are incorrigibles: Psychopaths who can't be redeemed or rehabilitated, and need to be imprisoned for life.)

RECTIFY is just outstanding. I highly recommend it. You'll need to get Netflix, though.

The idea of a judicial system that tries and punishes is fundamentally based on the idea that an offence against any single member of society is an offence against all of us -- against the social order. So we implicitly agree to cede our natural human desire for revenge to the state. The alternative is the poison of vendetta:  families/clans/tribes retaliating in an escalating and cross-generational program of exacting tit-for-tat revenge. The Hatfields vs the McCoys! A very civilizing notion indeed:  contracting out our natural impulse for revenge! 

Although I wonder just how natural revenge really is. When a close friend of mine was murdered by her boyfriend, I didn't feel my blood rise in revenge. I wanted him caught. But at that point, the deed was done and irrevocable, and he became effectively dead to me:  not worthy of one atom of my energy expended on his worthless ass. (He ended up killing himself. So at least he saved the taxpayer a lot of money by trying and sentencing and condemning himself!)