Compassion And The Courts

STOP the world, I wanna get off. I don t like where we re going. And I don t like how we re getting there. But the worst of it is that there doesn t seem to be a hope in hell of changing direction.
There was a time when people who broke the law were seen as human beings. And there was a consensus that they should be treated like human beings too. People seemed to agree that the purpose of punishing people for committing a crime was rehabilitation, not revenge. And an element of compassion was allowed in the treatment of people who were found guilty.
Well, at some point over the past 20 years the underlying sense of decency in the way our system of justice operates seems to have been lost. I know that not every judge conforms to stereotype. And there are victims of crime who show a courage and generosity that goes above and beyond the call of duty. But the trend for a long time has been towards harsher sentences, and a more punitive regime generally. The concept of Zero Tolerance was floated by the present Minister for Justice John O Donoghue, and now it s being put into effect, sometimes in a way that is simply appalling.
At the root of it is some atavistic need for scapegoats. It s as if years of civilising have been stripped away and vent is being given to a new and brutal kind of bloodlust. The mood seems to be that people should not only be punished severely but they should be seen to be punished severely irrespective of whether or not that s the appropriate response to a particular type of crime or misdemeanour.
I wrote about this not so long ago, in relation to the Philip Sheedy case. Sheedy was involved in a horrific, drink driving incident in which he killed a pedestrian. He was sentenced to four years in jail. Now while there s no doubt that it was a horrific incident, and that in circumstances like this, the family and relatives of the victim suffer greatly, I believe that the court s response was inappropriate. Philip Sheedy should not have been sent to jail.
A similar case in Donegal last week made even more harrowing reading. A fatal accident had resulted in the deaths of two people. The driver responsible for causing the accident was overtaking someone at 45mph in a 30 mile-an-hour zone.
In court, there were extraordinary scenes, with members of the victims families calling for the harshest possible sentence. Now I don t know on what basis this kind of special pleading is being allowed to take place, but it seems to me to be a horribly crude and prejudicial thing to permit people to stand up in court and put emotional pressure on the judge to deliver someone s head on a plate, even metaphorically.
What purpose can this serve, except to up the ante? There was at least a kind of purity in a situation where the judge made his or her own mind up, independent of outside forces. Presumably, relatives are now being allowed to have a say in court as some kind of gesture to victims of crime. But it is desperately misguided. Because if they do call for a harsh sentence, as the relatives did in Donegal, what if the judge ignores them? There is a therapeutic closure only if the judge accedes to their demands. But if the judge goes with calls of this kind, the process is no longer about justice it is about revenge. And if the judge doesn t, then the rage felt by people is merely intensified.
In Donegal, the driver was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in jail. For some people this clearly wasn t enough, and there were attempts to attack him outside the court.
Looking at him, I could only feel a surge of compassion. He seemed a ruined man and I m sure he is he ll have to live with the black knowledge that he killed two people for the rest of his life. But there is no basis for seeing him as evil. What he did was not malicious. I know too much about death to attempt even remotely to minimise the awful grief and the aching sense of loss felt by the relatives of the victims but he is in a different world to gangsters, bank robbers, heroin dealers or gun smugglers and he should be sentenced accordingly.
In cases like this and Philip Sheedy s, the guilty party should be banned from driving forever. He or she should be made to do community service of a substantial nature. And by all means require him or her to participate in compensating the relatives of the victims. But putting someone in jail is, I think, entirely inappropriate for crimes that are clearly not intentional or premeditated.
Which brings me back to where we started. What we need is more compassion, not less.
We certainly do need sensitivity to the plight of the victims, and those who are or were close to them but we also need to remember that the person who is being charged is human too. We need justice, not revenge.
And in particular we need an end to the kind of hatred and bloodlust that seems increasingly to characterise our attitude to those found guilty of crimes of one kind or another. n