Date: Wed, 17 Dec 1997 11:07:07 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Rape & Punishment


On Wed, 17 Dec 1997, Dave Bedggood wrote:

> Justin seems to think that working class justice has to develop from 
> bourgeois justice by some peaceful process

Where'd you get that? I said nothing about peaceful processes, or
nonpeaceful ones. In fact I would prefer peaceful processes, as would
anyone sane, but I'm not very sanguine about their likelihood.

 and that the latter should 
> not exist unless it fulfills some essential quality of bourgeois justice.

The essential quality involved is called fundamental fairness or due
process. And to forestall irrelevanr objections, let it be noted taht I
have acknowledged that bourgeois legality often falls shortof this idea,
especially as regards differential treatment of rich and poor, white and
Black.
 
>  I'm sorry if I gave him the impression that workers should hang around 
> outside bourgeois courts and impose some viligante law on innocent people.
>  I said no such thing.

Good.

> The case that Rebbecca nominated was of a violent rapist who had a 
> two year suspended sentence. I used "freed" in the literal rather 
> than legal sense. So he was found guilty in a bourgeois court.

Ah. And this is in fact a hard case. As you may know in the US we have
Megan's Law (widely adopted outside NJ), on which the neighbors of
convicted sex offenders are notified of their convictions as a warning.
One can see the point, but it's troubling. 

> But workers would still not "judge" this individual 
> on the basis of evidence presented in the bourgeois process, since 
> Justin accepts that this is often wrong. [How he knows "how often"
>  I don't know, and I wouldn't trust his sources for one moment. The 
> Mumia case itself shows that it is very difficult to get at the truth 
> if its buried by the system.]

Yes, but Mumia is atypical. I have explained how one knows that the system
usually gets right results as to guilt or innocence. Most criminals are
caught red-handed. A very high proportion confess. There's little reason
to think that confessions are generally coerced; a coerced confession is a
guaranteed get-out-of-jail-free ticket. Appeals are almost always to
suppress relevant evidence taht point to guilt because this evidence was
illegally obtained. The cops lie freely about how they got the evidence,
but frame-ups are rare. Partly this is because a frameup is a very serious
criminal offense and cops who are convicted of these are harshly punished.

> Anyway, the point about advocating a system of workers justice, is 
> not to impose some arbitrary vigilante justice, judged against 
> bourgeois norms, but to replace bourgeois justice with a higher form 
> of justice where the class interests of the working class were substituted 
> for those of the ruling class. 

Seems to me the working class has an interest in keeping people from being
mugged, raped, robbed, murdered, and defrauded. What a working class
justice would do is add to that the proviso that people have an interest
in not being exploited for profit, so that persons who commit
capitalist-type white collar crimes as well as environmental crimes also
get punished as harshly as they deserve. It's not that bourgeois justice
is defective so far as it goes. It's that it's incomplete.

 And I don't mean "higher" as in 
> attaining some idealist essence, but "higher" in terms of keeping 
> working class people getting into lumpen behaviour, sexist, racist, 
> etc. and keeping them out of the bosses jails so they can turn their 
> attention onto getting rid of the bosses and their system.
> Dave. 

Do you advocate criminalized sexist, racist, and other lumpen behavior
that's not violent or fraudulent? 

--jks




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