Stoopid Stuff

18 and Life to Go

So American Federal Prosecutors are going to ask the court to imprison Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse for the rest of his life. I don't know, maybe I'm just "objectively soft on piracy", but this seems neither fair nor appropriate. This is a desperately poor kid from Somalia. I'm not sure you or I or the Federal Prosecutor has any REAL understanding of his life circumstances nor the things he's had to see and deal with in his short life.

While he certainly committed a crime and needs to be dealt with in a criminal process, is it really the best we can do to lock him up for the next seventy years for the crime of being born Somali? This is reminiscent of nothing more than John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban". At what point does justice stop and pure vindictiveness begin? Where does mercy, compassion and understanding come into play? What is gained by throwing away a life that may very well be infinitely recoverable? How are we served by retribution, when mere justice would suffice?

It just seems to me that there is a wide range of acceptable outcomes in this case, and in many similar cases. And putting a hungry, uneducated Somali teenager in prison forever isn't within that range. If this kid serves two years or eight years, it's possible that there might still be a future for him, and a sad, sordid story might have an outcome that isn't simply tragedy. I have been saddened in recent years as our justice system has gone from something that supports our civilization to something that demeans it. It's become more about vengeance and hate than about justice or even anything even resembling rehabilitation. It's almost as if we don't want to help people avoid criminal behavior - as if repeatedly and severely punishing them feeds something dark within our souls.

Some things are not overwhelming in their complexity. Some things are easy to look at and say "this would be right, and this would be wrong". Some things are clear and simple, and just because we CAN do something does not mean it is something we SHOULD do. Justice can be served simultaneously with civilization, and we can clearly tell that something has gone horribly wrong when in the course of administering justice we demean ourselves as a society...

posted by mikey @ 6:29 PM