the timboucher experience

An interesting and somewhat disturbing movement is afoot to bring the idea of “evil” into the courtroom. An article on World Net Daily starts:

Research psychiatrists say they can now quantify evil, and they will be lobbying state legislatures to adopt their “depravity ratings” for use by courts determining whether to impose the death penalty on convicted murderers.

Long seen as a subjective moral term, evil, two recent studies of criminal personalities claim, can now be measured objectively.

There is even a website where you can go and help out in these studies. It’s called the Depravity Scale. There is a fifteen minute survey which gives you examples of fucked up intentions in committing crimes, lists examples, and then asks you how depraved you think it is.

Dr. Michael Welner, who is responsible for the Depravity Scale is on a mission to get this type of thinking formally adopted into civil law all over the country. Call me crazy, but this seems sort of fucked up. I mean, I’m aware that legal cases generally examine people’s intentions and attitudes already, but this seems like it goes several steps beyond that. This is an area that, to me, seems to border very closely on so-called “thoughtcrime.”

It calls to mind the debate over the concept of “Hate Crimes” in which a person who commits a crime motivated by racial or other prejudice is punished more severely than someone who commits the same crime without such motivation. An article on the topic has a useful passage which examines underlying assumptions in such cases:

Assumption One: Crimes are either more or less serious, depending on the thoughts and feelings of those who commit them.

Assumption Two: Government should be able to penalize citizens for how they think.

If Assumption One is true, than several factors must come into play to make it work. Judges and juries must not only determine whether the accused committed the crime, they must also decide — beyond a reasonable doubt — the mental processes that led to the crime. Then they must adjust the penalty, according to the accused’s reasoning and beliefs.

If Assumption Two is true, why should government wait for an actual crime to be committed? If people can be punished for unsanctioned opinions, why not simply make hate illegal and penalize those who show any evidence of it?

It seems like a “scale of evil” is only going to compound this dilemma, rather than help solve it at all. La Shawn Barber also has a good item about this whole hate-crime/thoughtcrime thing. She states, in part:

I’m going to demonstrate the silliness of these laws. Let’s suppose I’m bashing you over the head because you cut me off in traffic. There’s a law against that. Now let’s suppose I’m doing the same thing because you’re white, and I hate whites. Does the crime change? Why should I get two extra years in jail because I hate whites? If I’m beating you just because you’re white, does it hurt worse than if I’m beating you just because you cut me off in traffic?

Similar problems arise in calling people “evil” who commit criminal acts. If someone is convicted of a crime, that’s one thing. But what if they are also committed of being “evil?” What happens to them then? Are they going to have to endure a strict regimen of prison exorcisms? Are they going to be sodomized with the cross instead of when they drop the soap in the shower?

If we’re going to talk about evil and crimes though, I feel like we ought to pull out the big guns. My favorite quote on the topic comes from Jungian psychologist Marie Louise Von Franz:

The primitive idea that somebody who commits a murder or an outstanding crime is really not himself but performs something which only a god could expresses the situation very well. In the moment when someone commits a murder he is identical with the Godhead and is not human. People become the instruments of God’s darkness. At such a time, they are possessed. The very fact that somebody imagines that he can kill a fellow being, someone of the same substance as himself, which is not normal, transcends human nature, and in that way the deed has a demonic or divine quality. That is why, for instance, in the ritual executions in primitive tribes, you see that though they kill the criminals, there is no element of moral judgement about it; the criminal simply bears the consequences of his deeds. The primitive says that if a human being acts as though divine, then he suffers the fate of a god, is treated as a god and hanged, killed or dismembered, and so on. One cannot be in human society and behave like a divine being who can kill ad libitum.

But even with all this talk about “the instruments of God’s darkness” it is even maintained that there is no moral judgement made against this person. I think this goes back to the whole idea of “letting God sort them out,” because who are we to make judgements over the state of someone’s soul, especially in a courtroom setting.

For more info on this topic, check out the New York Times article on it, which goes into much more detail. (It’s currently locked in their paid archives section, but thanks to the magic of Furl, it has been liberated for your convenience!)

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