Harsh Justice
There was a time once when human life was held to be less valuable than it now is in our advanced societies. When, in countries like France or England, people could be thrown into jail for 'stealing', literally, a crust of bread. When children as young as six and eight were sent into the fields to work intolerably long hours in miserable circumstances along with their poverty-stricken parents, or underground to mine, along with sightless ponies.Societies thought themselves charitable when they operated workhouses for the indigent, when they took children into orphanages where cruelty and half-starvation was the order of the day.
We no longer live in that era. While it is undeniable that there are countries in the world where children are abducted from their tribal villages and brought to armed camps where they are taught to fire weapons, to attack others and to mercilessly kill - and where young girls become camp prostitutes - these atrocious assaults against the human rights of children do not occur, with impunity, in advanced, democratic countries of the world.
True, there is no place, no country in the world where children are completely safe from exploitation and misery, but most societies exercise a collective conscience that insists on protecting children from abuse, allowing them to grow into mature, well-balanced adults. Despite which, children pattern themselves after those closest to them. And when children are born into families that are seriously socially dysfunctional, it's little surprise children adopt those values.
But can a civilized country, one that models itself proudly as the foremost freedom-loving, -defending country in the world, have enacted laws that degrade the protected position of childhood? Well, surprisingly, seems so. News has reached the reading public that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled "that juveniles who commit crimes in which no one is killed may not be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole".
Now that is stunning. The very idea that in the United States of America young people not yet of the age of majority may be locked away for the rest of their natural lives. Five of the justices sitting on the Supreme Court supported a majority-held opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy in agreement that the 8th amendment of the American Constitution categorically forbids such sentences as cruel and unusual punishment.
The vote came out six-to-three. "A state need not guarantee the offender eventual release, but if it imposes the sentence of life, it must provide him or her with some realistic opportunity to obtain release before the end of that term", wrote Justice Kennedy. Astonishingly, to someone not an American, and not familiar with the American justice system, this ruling represents the first time the court has taken the step of excluding a class of offenders from an acknowledged form of punishment, other than the death penalty.
Why, in that great country with its vast population and legal system that seems the envy of so many other countries, was there never a separate category by which the crimes committed by young people, by juveniles, by children, would be judged taking into account that their values were not yet fully formed, that young people, given opportunities to correct their character flaws could go on to lead decent, normal lives, with the help of a more humanistic approach to judgement?
Dissenting Justice Thomas pointed out that a majority of states in his country favour severe punishment to be meted out to juveniles, that fully 37 states of the union, along with the federal government have enacted laws permitting life-without-parole sentences for juveniles who have been convicted of non-homicide offences. The State of Florida appears to be one of the states most given to such convictions. With another ten picking up the slack; in other words most states do not, even though they're on the books, apply such harsh penalties.
To apply such a level of punitive judgement against young people who offend society's ethics, morals and defensive laws is tantamount to taking the value of human life very slightly. Unspoken, but assumed, is the fact that those young people who so aggrieve the community as to become the victim of such harsh judgements are represented by the poor lower class, the uneducated, the unemployed, the misfits within society. And a stern society feels more secure with their firm incarceration.
So, well done, and about time....
Labels: Human Rights, Political Realities, United States
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, May 18, 2010
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