America has a criminal justice fetish. The success of the various versions of Law & Order attests to our fascination with crime and the nearly pathological desire to see people go to jail. Yet, our lust for punishment has taken a more egregious turn: incarcerating people, not for intentional wrongdoing, but rather for making mistakes. And it makes no sense.
In Minnesota, former police officer Kim Potter was found guilty of manslaughter, when she accidently grabbed her service weapon instead of a taser while trying to subdue Daunte Wright. Even the prosecutor called Potter’s actions a “colossal screw-up” and a “blunder of epic proportions.” When sentenced in February, Potter faces a potentially decades-long prison sentence for her error.
In Colorado, truck driver Rogel Aguilera-Mederos was recently sentenced to a mandatory 110 years in prison for driving a truck with bad brakes. Mederos killed four people when he lost control of his semi and failed to use a run-away truck ramp to stope. Hoping to pressure him into a plea bargain, the district attorney indicted him for crimes that carried incredibly long mandatory minimum sentences. Mederos exercised his Constitutional right to a jury trial and lost. At sentencing, the judge acknowledged that Mederos had not intended to hurt anyone but because the charges carried mandatory minimum sentences, he had no choice but to essentially lock him up for life.
But for the governor of Colorado reducing Mederos’ sentence to ten years, he would have had to serve more time in prison than most rapists, murderers and terrorists. Yet, even a decade behind bars for negligent or reckless conduct is excessive.
Let’s be honest. We all make mistakes. Some errors, unfortunately, can result in innocent victims being hurt or killed; Negligent or reckless behavior should not be taken lightly. However, we have a system for compensating those victims through civil suits, judgments of liability and monetary damages. But in the cases of Aguilera-Mederos and Potter, prosecutors decided that lawsuits were not sufficiently punitive. So, they charged them criminally.
Our justice system has four primary objectives: retribution (pay back for wrongdoing); rehabilitation (understanding the error and learning from it); incapacitation (keeping dangerous people off the streets); and deterrence (sending a message to others that criminal conduct won’t be tolerated). In theory, punishments should be crafted to account for each of these goals, yet not be more penalizing than necessary. Properly weighing all of these factors at sentencing can result in safer communities.
But how are the objectives of our criminal justice system achieved when we criminalize and over-punish people for negligence? Neither the truck driver nor the police officer will make the same mistakes, regardless of how long they spend in prison. Does anyone really believe that Mederos is a threat to public safety? Will Potter ever wear a badge again? Of course not. Neither require rehabilitation or incapacitation. Retribution could be accomplished through a civil suit. There is no need to put the defendants or their families through the trauma of a criminal trial and the loss of their liberty for unintentional mistakes.
That only leaves deterrence. Yes, we must hold people accountable to teach others not to make the same mistakes, particularly when lives are lost. But we already have a model to address deadly errors.
When physicians screw up, people often die. But doctors aren’t hauled before a judge and jury with a potential loss of freedom in the balance. Instead, the medical system holds a so-called Mortality and Morbidity Review. An MMR allows for doctors to acknowledge and learn from their mistakes, which increases patient safety. When combined with civil liability, an MMR accomplishes everything we hope to achieve through the criminal justice system without the cost to taxpayers, the harm to families, or the permanent trauma to the individual who is inevitably held accountable.
Too many people equate harsh sentences to less crime – even though that has long been disproven. Yes, we must hold people accountable for breaking the law. But there’s a point of diminishing safety returns; we don’t get any more public safety for the money we spend to lock people up for decades when they pose little threat to their communities.
Sending people to prison for negligence, won’t bring the victims back to their families. It will only create new victims – the spouses and children of those sent away. Imposing long prison sentences for mistakes won’t make us any safer. But they do eat up huge amounts of tax dollars that could be better used to put more cops on the street or pay for other effective public safety strategies. No, the only thing sentencing people for their errors does is to satisfy the cravings of Law & Order fans.
David Safavian is the General Counsel of the American Conservative Union and the Director of the ACU Foundation’s Nolan Center for Justice.