Vengeance is mine, too

I am extremely concerned about the Scott Peterson trial.

That’s a bit of an overstatement, actually: Until I began to research this column, I’d read no newspaper articles, watched no television shows and expended zero thought on Scott Peterson. Let me say instead that I am, by definition, concerned; and that my lack of visible concern is a moral failing; and that, when prosecutor Dave Harris said, “When the defendant dumped the bodies of his wife and unborn son into the bay, those ripples spread out and they touched many, many lives,” he was, however unwittingly, referring to my life as well as yours.

I mean that collective punishment is one of civilization’s defining features. My vote on a jury convicts a criminal, my tax dollars put in him jail and, should the state choose to execute him, one two-hundred-millionth of his blood is on my hands. The whole machinery of punishment is in the state’s hands, and by extension my hands, and were a victim’s relative to take his own revenge, he too would rightly fall prey to the state. Collective punishment is the state substitute for vengeance.

And collective punishment is at the foundation of everything because it identifies our personal interests with the interests of all: It says that if you kill someone of mine, you harm me less than you harm the community. Every crime is a blow against collective safety, and it is this broader identification of interest that moves us beyond a world of atomized individuals, families and tribes.

In fact, we settled the issue some 2,500 years ago; the point at which the community took from the individual the powers of punishment is marked in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, in which Athena ends the cycle of vengeance by putting the matricide Orestes on trial by jury:

I choose unto me judges that shall be

An ordinance for ever, set to rule

The dues of blood-guilt, upon oath declared.

“Look on this cause, discriminating well,

And pledge your oath to utter nought of wrong.”

The accusers, who would have had to kill Orestes themselves, are turned into mere witnesses; the wronged party is the state.

Back to Scott Peterson—and what a long way we’ve come. Last month, Peterson was convicted of murdering his wife and unborn son; the trial’s penalty phase began last Tuesday, and it was there that things began to get messy. “It became clear,” wrote Slate.com’s Dahlia Lithwick, “that ‘penalty phase’ is simply a term of art for ‘blatant emotional manipulation,’ as both sides did everything in their power to persuade the jury to vote only with their hearts.” With larger-than-life victim photographs, screaming from the witness stand and vast quantities of tears from both prosecution and defense, it was an orgy of Kleenex—in keeping with high-profile penalty phases around the country.

And this national descent into bathos is directly tied to the breakdown of collective punishment. According to Lithwick, “The penalty phase no longer represents a contest between the defendant and the state but, rather, becomes a contest between the defendant and the victims’ survivors.” This, in turn, “Is a result of years of advocacy by the victims-rights movement. Whereas victim-impact statements were once prohibited at trial, for example, the Supreme Court now holds them to be constitutionally permissible. Whereas the victim's family used to be almost incidental at a capital trial, they now play a central role.”

So the victims’-rights movement, well-intentioned as it may be, has narrowed the scope of our justice. If a trial primarily concerns the victim and the victim’s family, I can take the day off: I can become a spectator and a consumer of justice, not a potentially active party. Until crime hits me or my family directly, I am absolved of responsibility. By making it about them, victims’ families have ensured that it is not about us, the community as broadly conceived; every trial like Scott Peterson’s makes the community less likely to police itself, less likely to share a common culture, less likely even to be aware of its own existence. Our atomization continues apace.

I am concerned about Scott Peterson because I am a citizen, and I have to be; but I’m also concerned because the-trial-as-entertainment and the victims’-rights movement—which are intimately connected—tell us that we are not responsible for one another. They tell us that it is fine to watch and smile until we get hurt, at which point we can expect to be watched and smiled at. Forgive me for expecting a little more out of our justice system.

Our justice system. It sounds, even to my ears, hopelessly naïve. Which is exactly the problem.

Rob Goodman is a Trinity senior.