Crime and punishment

It’s been called “The McMissile” case, and at first it’s sort of funny.

It started last summer in Virginia. Jessica Hall, 25, was driving north on I-95 in backed-up traffic when a car piloted by Pete Ballin, 36, cut Hall off for the second time. Hall, who was driving with her three children and pregnant sister, lost it, and threw a large McDonald’s cup filled with ice into the other car.

The cup flew into Ballin’s vehicle and landed on his girlfriend Eliza Fowle, 28, who was sitting in the passenger’s seat. “It was gross and sticky and got all over me and the front of our car, the dashboard and the windshield,” Fowle said. Ballin and Fowle, understandably pissed, found a state trooper up the highway and reported Hall. She was arrested, released on her own recognizance, and a trial date was set for Jan. 3.

Cool so far, maybe? Stupid road rage deserves to be punished, right? Depends on your point of view. Last month, the jury found her guilty of “maliciously throwing a missile into an occupied vehicle,” which is a felony in Virginia that carries a two-year minimum sentence.

Hall’s children are aged 4, 6 and 8, and her husband is currently serving his third round in Iraq. There’s little humor behind this verdict. Not even Fowle thought it would go this far, calling the sentence “Absolutely ridiculous.” She added, “Community service would have made more sense.”

Absolutely ridiculous is a pretty good way to put it. Let’s ask, for a second, what is achieved by locking up Jessica Hall for two years? Will it make her see the error of her ways? Will it make society safer? She’s a mother of three with no criminal record, or (to our knowledge at least) history of violence. Jessica Hall is no menace to society, and in her own words, “I must have been wrong…but seriously, God. Lesson learned. Lesson learned is one hour in this place.”

The judge later reduced Hall’s sentence to probation, but it’s not a huge leap of faith to think it wouldn’t have happened without all the media attention, and that is troubling. We as a society cannot respond to incidents like these by throwing the perpetrators into jail for years. What does it really accomplish?

What such a far-reaching sentence might accomplish, perhaps, is to send a message to the citizens of Virginia that the consequences for violent road rage are indeed dire, dire enough to warrant conviction of a felony and two years in jail.

George Elsasser, the assistant commonwealth attorney who handled the case, made the argument that had Ballin been hit by the McDonald’s cup, he could have gotten into an accident that would have caused serious injuries, hence such prosecution was warranted. That’s understandable, but it also has some very sinister implications. Do we really want to live in a society with those kinds of harsh punishments? Do we really want to prosecute defendants on “what if” scenarios? Is putting these people behind bars truly that important?

We can apply this same idea to a very different and much more serious situation, namely the one of Ernst Z퀌_ndel. Z퀌_ndel is an infamous German Holocaust denier who was recently sentenced to the maximum term of five years in prison for “inciting racial hatred,” a crime in Germany. Prosecutor Andreas Grossmann referred to Z퀌_ndel as a “political con man,” from whom the German people must be protected.

These are very weighty issues, but I would ask Grossmann what he means by “protected,” a pretty loaded (and presumptuous) word. Are the German people safer because Ernst Z퀌_ndel is in jail? There’s no doubt that he is, for lack of more sophisticated words, a total scumbag, but is that enough to justify his incarceration?

I’m having a hard time buying it, just like I’m having a hard time buying the felon status of Jessica Hall. This is not the solution. The problems don’t disappear because these people go to jail, and putting them in jail is not going to make the world a better place.

Who benefits from this incarceration? Whose lives are improved when these people are locked up? The argument could be made, at least in the cases of Hall and Z퀌_ndel, that it’s the principle of the thing. Their offenses do symbolize some pretty crappy stuff in today’s society (albeit on different ends of the Crappiness Scale), and it’s reasonable to think that it deserves punishment in the form of imprisonment in order to send a signal of sorts out to the rest of the world, to show everybody that these are the consequences for getting involved in whatever we determine the ills of society to be. A preventive measure. That’s understandable.

But it can be carried too far.