Letter from Los Angeles — Part Two
[Sam Pillsbury is a Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, in Los Angeles. He teaches criminal law, criminal practice, and American legal history. This is the second of a series of excerpts from his stunningly human and moving new book, “Imagining a Greater Justice: Criminal Violence, Punishment and Relational Justice” (Routledge 2019), which he has generously contributed to this blog. The full text is available at the publisher’s link, here.]
From Chapter One: Violence and the Soul
When I was a reporter in North Florida I covered proceedings in a capital case in which a teen was charged with killing a young woman as she opened a café for business in the morning. Apparently she was killed as part of a robbery. She was stabbed to death.
The defendant, a white kid who looked like he belonged in high school, was silent throughout but he made a loud impression. He had an almost gleeful, smirking manner, as if he were picking his nose in front of the teacher, trying to impress the kids in the back of the class. He had been arrested near the cafe with the murder weapon (the knife) not long after the killing occurred. He told the police that he had been given the knife just minutes before by a man named “Mike,” otherwise unknown to him. A ludicrous story.
I don’t remember the case because of the defendant, though. It was the victim’s surviving husband that engraved this case on my memory. He was a middle-aged man, considerably older than his wife. The husband was devastated, ravaged from the inside. He came to court early every morning, sat in front and stared hate at the defendant. He was in hell and seemed to wish nothing more than to take his wife’s killer there with him.
I was startled by the man’s presence. I couldn’t have been surprised that having a loved one murdered was a devastating experience. I was surprised that his rage and heartbreak was so palpable. It seemed to vibrate in the room. In years since I have encountered victims in a similar state of anguish and rage on a number of occasions. The grief and anger is always tangible and always disturbing. It is agony.
This was one of my first encounters with the spirit devastation of violence. Everyone knows about it, sort of, but to really understand it we have to sit in its darkness, must remain in its presence until we feel the pain, or a little of it. Usually we find reasons to distance ourselves from the most hurt, perhaps after expressing our sympathies.
Sympathizing with the hurt will not be enough to understand their experience, however. As with my encounter with this distraught husband in a Florida courtroom, there remains a mystery about the nature of the connection between perpetrators and survivors. To understand its power and intimacy we need to explore how human beings make spirit connections. Then we may grasp how wrongful violence attacks the soul.
Harms to Body, Harms to Spirit: Two Stories
To illustrate the moral and spirit harms of wrongful violence, I offer two fictional, but realistic stories of violence to a child.
First Story. A six-year-old boy gets up in the morning and wanders into the kitchen, still in his Superman pajamas. He’s hungry. He knows that if he wants any breakfast that he will have to get it for himself. He reaches up into a kitchen cabinet and gets out a glass for juice. He takes a gallon container of orange drink from the refrigerator, but it is too big and heavy for him, and in trying to pour some into the glass, he knocks the glass onto the floor where it shatters and juice spills everywhere.
The noise brings his father to the kitchen. In this account, I will imagine that it is his father, but it could equally be the boy’s mother, or a stepfather or stepmother, grandparent or some other caregiver—what is important for the story is that this adult is a parent figure for the boy, who is supposed to care for him.
Imagine that the father, infuriated by the boy’s clumsiness and the mess made, with a full swing of the arm smacks the boy in the face with an open hand, sending him crashing headfirst into the kitchen table. He suffers a cut and facial bruising. The father then walks away.
This event can be analyzed from a social perspective, from a psychological perspective, from a cultural perspective, a gender perspective. Each of these will be important to understanding and responding to the event, but none will suffice unless we also consider it from a moral perspective. What happened here is wrong. But what kind of wrong?
In the past, violence like this against a child which did no lasting physical harm was seen as a private matter because it concerned the domestic discipline of a child. Family members or neighbors or other community members might have criticized the father for his brutality, but the incident would not have drawn the serious attention of the police or the law. In effect, the community condoned such violence. It is one of the more important changes in American society that today many kinds of violence in the home previously ignored have become matters for serious criminal investigation, prosecution and punishment. Removing such violence from private protection and making it a public matter represents a change in both public morals and legal practice.
Second Story. To illustrate the spirit challenges of violence, imagine the same kitchen accident, followed by a different adult response. The father, infuriated by the boy’s clumsiness and the mess made, says in a biting tone: “You little piece of shit. You’re never going to amount to anything, you know that? You’re always going to be fucking loser. And don’t even think about crying.”
Unlike the first incident, this conduct is not criminal today. However hurtful the words, no physical injury has occurred. Under contemporary law, these words are just words. The father may be criticized by family members, and by others, for verbal brutality, but that will be, in most cases, the end of the critique. When it comes to parental discipline, the criminal law draws a line between the use of force and the use of words.
But consider, for a moment, these two events from the child’s perspective. For a child who might have experienced both, which would have been worse? The first was physically painful; the second was not. The first was frightening in a way that the second was not. And yet to a child’s spirit, the vicious words might strike harder and the hurt might go deeper than the blow. Victims of child abuse and domestic violence often say that however bad their physical injuries, the insults flung by their abuser hurt more.
Precisely because there was no physical injury in the second story, we can see more clearly the spirit harm inflicted there. The words were spoken with harmful intent. They were meant to cause emotional injury, and almost certainly did. The adult declared the boy worthless. The boy was (verbally) rejected as a person by one who was supposed to care for him unconditionally. This was a moment of profound devaluation and exclusion from belonging.
Now return to the experience of the boy in the first story. He suffered physical pain and fear of injury in the incident. But he was also hurt, we can easily imagine, by the message delivered by his father’s blow. In that hard slap the boy learned that he did not count for much. Accidentally smashing a glass was enough for him to be deliberately smashed by his dad. As a result, the boy’s spirit suffered, just as in the case of verbal abuse. The boy suffered a similar injury to self-worth and experienced much the same sense of isolation and injury to trust. Where there is a physical assault, as here, the spirit harms of violence can easily go unnoticed. The spirit harms may do more damage, however.
The boy struck by his father will grow up to be a man who knows violence in his bones. This is one of violence’s terrible lessons. Especially if the abuse experience is repeated, he will know a great deal about violent threat—what it feels like, how sudden it can be, and will know something about how to defend body and soul against it. He will have learned, very early, that no one can be entirely trusted. The young man may grow up with a great store of anger seeking release, and a highly developed sense of personal danger that makes him much readier than others to perceive threat and respond with violence. He may become a man whose sudden rages and explosions of violence surprise even himself. None of this is inevitable, but the chances of his becoming a man prone to violence increase greatly with childhood experiences of violence. This includes the experience of seeing violence done to others. The man of today was shaped by the boy who was traumatized. We cannot understand or effectively address the man’s present violence without seeing and appreciating the moral and spiritual hurts of his youth.
From this we can see why the moral and spiritual dimensions of wrongful violence are critical to understanding what a just response to such violence might be. The right must match the wrong.