Is Anyone Really Guilty Anymore?

“Justice delayed is justice denied.”  “The wheels of justice grind slowly but ever so fine.”  “Better that one-hundred guilty persons go free than one innocent person should suffer.”  These are incompatible aphorisms that at various times have been asserted about the American justice system.  

The first was clearly employed when William McKinley was assassinated in 1901.  The President died on September 14, and his killer was executed a month and a half later.  As a Facebook contributor noted, “If the justice system worked the way it did for McKinley, [Tyler] Robinson would have been dead by December, 2025.”  More accurately, Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer would have exited this life by Halloween last year.  

The assertion that “justice delayed is justice denied,” despite its frequent repetition, is a concept honored more in the breach than in the observance.  Tyler Robinson’s preliminary hearing, for example, won’t be concluded until September, almost a year after Kirk’s murder.  Karmelo Anthony’s trial took over fourteen months after the knife-totting youngster stabbed and killed Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet.  Recently Anthony’s hearing for a retrial was denied.  Appeals will doubtless follow.    

That the wheels of modern American justice “grind slowly” is obvious, but the “ever so fine” conclusion is risible.  Jury or judge politicization is clear in cases involving, for example, O.J. Simpson, Donald Trump, and thousands of January 6 defendants.  Meanwhile, we wait without much hope for justice to be “ground out” for the high-profile criminals involved in Crossfire Hurricane and Arctic Frost. 

Surprisingly, Benjamin Franklin embraced the hundred-to-one, guilty-to-innocent cliché, an exaggeration of the figure previously articulated by England’s PM William Blackstone who put the ratio at a more modest ten to one.  Practically speaking, anyone who touts Franklin’s formula effectively washes his hands of blood shed on the streets by the scores of criminals who evade punishment for the sake of an unreasonable legal scorecard.  Moreover, since criminals tend to reoffend and do so more frequently if the odds of being punished are slight, the number of innocent victims quickly grows to multiples of the initial figure.  In short, the assertion of a hundred to one standard is a form of “suicidal empathy” or, more accurately, “narcissistic empathy”-- i.e. a statement that flatters the speaker’s ego and overlooks victims actually sacrificed for the sake of a rhetorical yardstick.   

Of course law enforcement and the system of justice should be structured to avoid sending innocent people to prison, but the modern fixation on one side of the judicial and law enforcement equation has devastating consequences.  Here’s an alternate aphorism that should gain traction:  “The fewer criminals caught and expeditiously punished, the more innocents will be harmed by criminals.”  Conversely, the more criminals caught and swiftly punished, the fewer innocent victims will be harmed.  This inverse correlation is all the more relevant since it’s widely conceded that crime, especially violent crime, is largely concentrated in a small portion of the population, typically estimated at five percent or less.  El Salvador’s President Bukele, much vilified abroad but adored at home, totally transformed his country from a gang-ruled hellhole to a playground sanctuary for children by imprisoning one percent of the population.     

So why has our judicial system changed so much from the days of McKinley’s assassination when swift justice was the order of the day to the present where a plethora of “safeguards” have been placed on law enforcement and within the judicial system to prevent innocent individuals from being falsely convicted of a crime and guilty persons from being convicted based on faulty procedures?   The “not one innocent” mentality is largely the product, I believe, of a therapeutic culture in which the idea of personal responsibility has been drastically attenuated.  Villainy has been scaled down to reduced mental capacity or unfortunate environmental circumstances as the psychiatrist Karl Menninger noted a half-century ago in his book Whatever Happened to Sin.  

That’s not to say that such factors are totally irrelevant, but our obsessive desire for non-volitional explanations arises alongside an even deeper desire to deny the reality of evil.  Accordingly, those hundred guilty persons theoretically going free are vaguely felt to be victims of biology or society.  More specifically, for many females demonstrating outside the Clancy trial in Massachusetts it’s inconceivable that a woman would knowingly strangle her three young children.  It’s just too evil.  Thus, the heinous act becomes itself an argument against her criminal culpability and diffuse responsibility falls instead on medical practitioners and the pharmaceutical industry.  

In short, according to this perspective evil doesn’t really exist in individuals but rather in institutions and persons directing those institutions.  It’s a fantasy touted by Rousseau who claimed people are born good but are corrupted by society, a belief that leaves hanging a basic question:  How does a corrupt society arise from naturally good humans?  That’s not a problem faced by those who believe evil lies within the human heart and that, as Immanuel Kant asserted (albeit in German), “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”  It’s a thought that at least helps explain the legal and human foibles discussed above. 

 Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

SUICIDAL EMPATHY: Dying to be Kind

Rhamell Burke had been arrested four times since February 2^nd for assault, burglary, drugs, and weapons charges.  On May 7^th he was released from New York’s Bellevue Hospital psychiatric facility, and a few hours later he allegedly shoved seventy-six year old Ross Falzone down a flight of subway stairs, resulting in Falzone’s death.  One of the prior assault charges involved a young woman who declined to press charges.  The 23-year-old lady later said, “Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail.”  Reportedly, she now regrets her choice whose tragic consequence has been cited as an instance of suicidal empathy, or more accurately in this case, homicidal empathy.

The term “suicidal empathy” was coined by Professor Gad Saad, and his new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, revolves around the concept.  Rhamell Burke’s repeated low- or no-consequence legal encounters and the young woman’s confession about her mental disposition constitute two prime examples of the psychic malady in which compassion for ostensibly victimized groups is so overblown that it outweighs social well being.  Saad provides a plethora of additional examples including attitudes toward illegal aliens, drug users, the homeless, transgenders, Hamas terrorists, and even socialism.  These feelings are connected to destructive policies such as open borders, massive benefits for illegals, absurd indulgences for criminals, men in women’s sports, anti-merit DEI programs, and numerous redistribution efforts that reward failure and punish success.    

Saad’s work is a valuable resource for identifying areas where empathy has been weaponized with palpably destructive results.  Billed as an “evolutionary psychologist,” Saad is less focused when it comes to explaining the reasons behind what he frequently calls the “misfiring” (or even “orgiastic misfiring”) of the emotional system, thus linguistically linking suicidal empathy to a cerebral malfunction.  Elsewhere in the book Saad points to a highly theoretical cognitive function:  “The West’s lack of a cultural theory of mind is destroying our societies.”  His primary focus, however, when it comes to the etiology of the affective malady, centers on academic institutions that spawned theories such as cultural relativism and deconstructionism, philosophical perspectives that undermine traditional ideas about truth and natural law.  With intellectuals freed from the pursuit of truth, their endeavors moved toward emotionally driven projects as opposed to rational analysis of moral principles and hard evidence, especially in Saad’s case hard evidence grounded in evolutionary development.   (C.S. Lewis came to a similar conclusion in The Abolition of Man based on the modern rejection of objective truth.)

Thus, it isn’t surprising that Saad cites with approval Thomas Sowell’s idea in The Vision of the Anointed about the intelligentsia espousing “policies that make them feel virtuous for their unlimited compassion while being decoupled from the actual consequences of their policies.”  Unlike Las Vegas, ideas that originate in academia don’t stay there.  The attitude of suicidal empathy, Saad observes, spreads like a contagion, as illustrated by the head-turning pace with which transgenderism infected the whole country bringing with it biological absurdities, the invasion of girls’ sports, and even the mutilation of children’s bodies for the sake of “gender affirmation.”  Of course this contagion wasn’t spread by germs floating in the air; it was spread by educational and media institutions controlled by Democrats, Socialists, and Marxists -- a sociological and political point obscured by Saad’s overreliance on biological and psychological perspectives.

My own term for the largely unscrutinized compassion associated with suicidal empathy is “utopian narcissism.” The policy of unlimited empathy is impractical and thus utopian, but the true reason for demanding compassion toward presumably victimized groups is, as Sowell observes, self-congratulation and not empathy.  Thus, being ignorant of a policy’s negative consequences is essential to bolster one’s sense of moral superiority.  In this regard physical separation from those consequences, combined with political insularity, conspire with media complicity to enforce ignorance of rapes, murders, human trafficking, and drug deaths attributable, for instance, to Biden’s open border policy.  Indeed, in California identifying a criminal as an illegal alien by law enforcement or the media carries a professional stigma akin to use of the n-word.  Better to hide the truth from Hollywood stars and a general public infected with suicidal (or narcissistic) empathy than to risk the discomfort of cognitive dissonance.    

Another explanation I would propose for unlimited compassion is even crasser than the aforementioned ego-inflating rationale, namely, power.  Political players often feign empathy as a cynical tool to gain support from various groups.  In the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center their “empathy” secretly funded enemies of “victimized” groups to make it clear how important it was for likeminded folks to support their organization.  If one wishes to add a Messianic savior complex to this cynical power play, that oxymoronic combo can’t be excluded.

In short, Saad is to be commended for delineating the large number of cases where empathy for supposedly victimized groups has suicidal consequences.  His diagnosis of the academic origin of the contagion also has merit, though additional and simpler explanations are available as well.  Saad’s heavy reliance on biological and psychiatric analytical tools, however, sometimes obscures motives that aren’t all that murky -- self-aggrandizement, cynical manipulation, self-hatred, power, and even the thrill (and benefits) of blindly identifying with an elite in-group under the guise of compassion.  

 Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge