How Far Can The Law Protect Us?

The law is supposed to dispense justice, both for the accused and for their victims. But in a flawed world with legal loopholes and “ordinary” criminals, we must confront the possibility that horror can become reality all too easily.

Simple Human Violence

In 2011, Fayhan al-Ghamdi, a Saudi Arabian preacher, raped and murdered his five-year-old daughter and was ordered by the court to pay ‘blood money’ to her mother as recompense. Today, after much protesting by the Saudi public, he has been sentenced to eight years in prison. One would think that such a heinous crime would at least warrant a life imprisonment, if not the death penalty, which is legal in Saudi Arabia, but instead the law blatantly favoured a criminal at the expense of justice.

It would be easy to chalk this down as an isolated instance, to blame the corrupt patriarchy that exists in Saudi Arabia while watching comfortably on our television screens behind locked doors. It’s a coping mechanism of ours to distance ourselves from the horrors we see on the news: school shootings, brutal rapes, serial killings, child abductions.

We turn the murderers, rapists, muggers and terrorists into faceless monsters because nothing scares us more than the possibility that they could be just like us. This in turn opens the way for the possibility that it could be our names in those newspaper headlines, our photos on the television screen with a date and cause of death.

Those victims are not victims of war or natural disasters but of simple human violence, something that could happen anywhere, to any of us.  And worst of all is the thought that the supposedly faceless murderer, rapist or mugger could be the person standing behind us in line at the grocery store.

The 2012 Sandy Hook shooting was shocking because the perpetrator was an ordinary member of the community. [Image credit: Urban Times]

Faults in the Safety Net

We tend to see the law as a protective barrier between us and them, a safety net of sorts, and the idea that this net might give way as it did in the case of al-Ghamdi is terrifying. And yet reports show that since 2008, 262 suspected violent criminals in the US have escaped prosecution.

A lot of times this was due to a blunder in police paperwork or some minor loophole in the law that was exploited. For instance, in September 2013, Christopher Halliwell confessed to murdering Becky Godden-Edwards but avoided prosecution because the investigating officer failed to read him his rights.

In October of the same year, convicted murderers Joseph Jenkins and Charles Walker walked out of Franklin Correctional Institute in Florida after forging their release papers. These little mishaps, tiny rents in the safety net, can have exponentially disastrous effects, enough to suggest that the faith we place in our legal system might be misguided.

In 1965, the death penalty was abolished in Britain, to be replaced by a mandatory life sentence, which today is an average of 14 years. By 1983, formal punitive periods known as tariffs had been introduced; a tariff term has to be served in full before the Parole Board can consider release.

In 1986, George Johnson was jailed for the torture and murder of a hotel worker and then released in 2006, before ending up back in jail a few years later for bludgeoning to death Florence Habesch. Johnson was then given a full life tariff, but had he received this sentence to begin with, his second victim might have been spared.

Rationalising, Justifying and Excusing

Many times, it takes only a clever lawyer to help a criminal worm his or her way out of facing justice, usually by taking advantage of an ambiguously worded law. Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ law, which gives individuals the right to defend themselves with deadly force if needed, is one such notorious example. Seventy percent of people convicted for murder have walked free because of this defence.

And, while it may spare a battered housewife trying to protect herself from an abusive husband, it may also let someone like George Zimmerman escape justice after murdering a teenager in what he perceived to be self-defence. Self-defence, like the insanity defence, is a good idea on paper but in practice it can become a tool for corruption and misuse.

George Zimmerman’s acquittal caused national controversy [Image credit: Urban Times]

Criminal psychologists try to pin labels on criminals, citing traumatic childhoods, histories of abuse and mental illness in an attempt to understand the seemingly inexplicable. But often the next step after rationalising is justifying, and by ascribing a motive one may fall into the trap of excusing someone’s behaviour. And while some criminals may be genuinely mentally ill, the definition of ‘insanity’ in a court is sometimes hazy enough that it can be twisted and embellished by a lawyer.

Was Blackstone Right?

There are holes in every system, but what happens when they become wide enough for injustices to slip past? The solutions to this dilemma seem to be either to abolish such laws whose vague wording can be manipulated, or to impose checks and balances upon them, in order to reign them in within certain limits. Corruption will always be rampant, and mistakes will always be made, so the only answer must be for legislators to enforce preventative methods to ensure that the law does what it is supposed to instead of undermining its own purpose.

18th century jurist William Blackstone said that it is better to let ten guilty men walk free than to let one innocent man be wrongly convicted. But what is the cost of that innocent man’s life? Injustice for the victims of the criminals set free and for their families, not to mention a potential threat to future victims. And for the rest of us, behind our locked doors: fear that the horror stories on our television screens might become our reality.

This article was originally published on Urban Times.