The Audacity of Jeanine Pirro

Yesterday, the Washington Post published an editorial by Washington D.C.'s Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, where she demands the elimination of various D.C. laws that provide leniency to juvenile offenders under the guise of making D.C. "safe." These include the Youth Rehabilitation Act, which suspends mandatory minimums for many crimes when the defendant is under the age of 25, and the Incarceration Reduction Amendment and Second Look Amendment Acts, which lets persons imprisoned for crimes committed while under the age of 25 to petition for resentencing after 15 years of incarceration.

I've written before about my art collection, and in particular the story of Halim Flowers (whose work in large part prompted my interest). Flowers was the beneficiary of the laws Pirro is indicting here -- he committed his crime when he was sixteen, sentenced to life in prison, but was eventually released after serving 22 years (when he was nearly forty). If Jeanine Pirro had her way, he would still be locked up, and we would have lost the beauty he has created as a sacrifice to our misplaced pride -- the arrogance to know that these children can never and will never have anything to offer society, and that we lose nothing by keeping them caged forever. Halim Flowers is testament to why laws like this must exist. 

Whenever I think about laws insisting on the lifetime incarceration of juvenile offenders, I think: would we as a society really be better off if he was still warehoused? How much else in the way of beautiful art are we depriving ourselves of by locking away so much of our human potential? Or forget art -- or business, or writing, or anything else externalized by the outside world. How much love are we giving up? How many relationships are we stymying? How many families are we poisoning? Who does this help? Perhaps there are some criminals who are truly incorrigible (though most age out of violent criminality by forty or so), but for any individual kid it's hard to imagine knowing that with so much advance confidence that one will refuse to even let the child have a chance to become a different person. Our assumptions about which children are incorrigible criminals are very often wrong, and we should have the humility to allow ourselves to be proven wrong.

The retort, of course, is the put oneself in the shoes of the victims. It's of course hard for me to imagine  a world where my wife or my son was murdered -- my brain sort of does an emergency shut-off at the thought. My best guess is that it would turn me into a broken shell of a man, and nothing would resurrect me from my nightmarish hell. It would be too cheap to say that's freeing (why bother imposing any punishment if, either way, I'll still be a broken shell of man trapped in an inescapable nightmare?) -- I certainly think I'd want the wrongdoer to be held accountable in some fashion for what they've done. But I imagine (and again, this is only imagination) that eventually, all I'd want is to not have to think about the murderer again. I don't know if I could ever forgive him. But nor would I want to expend energy hating him. The gravest injustice someone could do to me, twenty years after the fact, would be to make the murderer my mental responsibility -- whether it's the responsibility to declare "he should he go free" or the responsibility to insist "he must stay locked up." Just let me pretend that I can forget. Is that too much to ask?

What Pirro is doing here is not to the benefit of the victims or their families. They deserve better than to be pulled into this debate. The people who want leniency will urge them to show forgiveness, the people who want punitiveness will lean on them to recount their trauma. Both demands are torturous. It is an injustice on top of an injustice that we ask this of them. Just leave them alone. They've suffered enough.

Impossible questions don't yield easy answers, and I don't pretend these answers are easy. But their very impossibility makes it more essential that D.C. residents be the ones to decide for themselves -- not an outsider commissar imposed on a subjugated population deprived of its democratic rights. Jeanine Pirro does not want what's best for D.C. residents. Jeanine Pirro does not care about D.C. residents. Crime in D.C. is in fact falling (and the most prominent recent incident of mass criminality in D.C. was of course orchestrated on Trump's behalf and the site of mass pardons by Trump to inaugurate his second term), but this was never actually about what's good for one of the American colonies anyway. Jeanine Pirro is literally inventing more misery so that she can inflict more misery on the world. What a despicable human being.

One other side note: When I clicked the link to open Pirro's column, I saw with bittersweet amusement a banner informing me that my Washington Post subscription will expire in one more day (I canceled in October following their Harris non-endorsement fiasco, but I had renewed last August for a year). Even now, this is a hard moment -- I grew up with the Post, I loved it dearly, and even now I know its reporters do some great journalism. But it is, in a way, helpful to get a reminder of the feckless, Vichy nihilism that the paper now embodies (the publication of this editorial wouldn't have offended me so much if the Post hadn't just announced new ideological limits on the opinion pieces it would run -- tell me, is Pirro's lock-up-the-kids crusade in the category of "personal liberties" or "free markets"?). No principles, no values, just crass accommodation of the worst people in power. Who could really miss a newspaper like that? For that, and that alone, I'm grateful to the Post for giving me a perfect sendoff as my time as a subscriber draws to a close.