Marissa Alexander’s case is not so much about Florida’s stand your ground law as it is about the connections between interrelated facets of her case including gender, domestic violence, and mandatory minimums. In Part I of this series, we explored the role of gender while Part II covered the double standards applied to evaluating violence in the context of domestic violence.
This last post looks at the final problem for Marissa Alexander: the mandatory minimum sentence.
Image: Amazon
A mandatory minimum is exactly what it sounds like: a minimum sentence that a judge is required to give upon certain convictions. Mandatory minimums can be tied to specific crimes, but, as we see in Alexander’s case, they can also be applied to certain circumstances as well. Florida’s 10-20-life law falls into the latter category.
The concept behind 10-20-life was a simple one, and it relies upon basic criminal justice principles outlined as far back as 1764 by Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishments. This essay sets forth many of our enduring criminal justice principles, including the idea that criminal offenders are pragmatic, rational, utility-maximizing individuals. If people know ahead of time that punishment will be swift, certain, and severe, they can make rational choices and will, hopefully be deterred from preventing crime.
That’s your crash course in Classical Criminology, by the way. Never mind that modern criminology has moved far, far away from these ideas, they still resonate and inform our current practices. It’s no surprise that the Florida legislature thought this was a grand idea.
FL DOC: Public Domain Image
It’s appealing. Make a law, publicize the hell out of it, and then follow through. They couldn’t do a lot about swift, but certain and severe were entirely within the reach of 10-20-life. So they did it.
They did it, also, against a backdrop of increasingly harsh and punitive attitudes, policies, and practices that arose from the Get Tough era of crime control in this country. The “get tough” mentality was more than a mere slogan; it was a battle cry that rang out in the “war on crime” and the “war on drugs” and in the eternal struggle to win public office. The thinking was poisonous, irrational, and contagious.
Crime was not so much a disease with treatable symptoms, as the medical model had postulated for so many decades previously, crime was something much bigger and scarier. The only way to fight crime was to do just that: fight. The language and rhetoric around crime created a frenzy in which the general public was clamoring for harsher policies and laws, and no politician could get elected on a criminal justice platform that was anything other than punitive.
Goodbye reason and compassion. Most importantly? Goodbye science and empiricism. Criminal justice polices were all based on what feels good, and what felt good back then was to be as ugly as possible. The major policies that came out of this era were truth in sentencing, three strike laws, and mandatory minimums. All of these led to our current crisis in mass incarceration.
I do have to point out that mandatory minimums, in principle, were designed to make the criminal justice more fair. Everyone hates the stories we read in the news about some violent scumbag who ultimately winds up with a sentence of time served plus probation. Mandatory minimums were supposed to fix that.
What they really did, though, was to make the entire system more harsh. Rather than function as an equalizer, mandatory minimums became an effective tool in the prosecutor’s belt during plea bargaining. It became a way to pressure the defense toward a plea bargain, and to resolve cases quickly without the messiness, time, and expense entailed by a jury trial. It certainly does not function in the way that it was intended.
So how does all of this relate to Marissa Alexander?
It’s the last piece in her painful puzzle. She got a 20 year sentence not because what she did was so horrible, but because she got swept up in the unintended consequences of bad public policy and legislation. Mandatory minimums, by definition, remove judicial discretion. While the judge has come under fire for the sentence, it truly wasn’t his fault. That’s how 10-20-life works.
Marissa Alexander is just another case file that gets shoved in the heap of unintended consequences. She thought she was innocent, she thought it worth the fight. In the end, it wasn’t.
Like all gamblers, the players in the criminal justice system have to remember that the house always wins. It’s not fair, it’s not designed to be fair. The house wins.
Related articles:
- Part I: Marissa Alexander Isn’t Really About Stand Your Ground (crimedime.com)
- Part II: Marissa Alexander Isn’t Really About Stand Your Ground (crimedime.com)
- Neutrality is Not an Option in Violence Against Women Claims (crimedime.com)
- The Terrible Price of Mass Incarceration (crimedime.com)
- Shame of mandatory minimums shows in Marissa Alexander case (cnn.com)
- Experts: Florida’s ’10-20-Life’ empowers prosecutors but handcuffs judges, juries, defense attorneys (jacksonville.com)
Louise Behiel
June 1, 2012
With every post, I want to explore the Canadian system and see where we’re similar and where we’re different. I haven’t done it yet, but I will, as soon as I have a moment of time. because this is all fascinating. I struggle with cynicism at times. the political system here is a mess; so is education and health care (I still prefer our system to the for profit one in the US) and so is criminal justice. the problems are so big they seem almost impossible to solve. and yet they need resolution.
sighhhh I’m glad I decided to work with one person at a time.
The Color of Lila
June 1, 2012
I agree this wasn’t the judge’s fault; his hands were tied. But as we discussed earlier in this series, given the contents of the deposition by Gray, how the heck was she charged at all? And why DIDN’T this qualify as “stand your ground?” I don’t buy the argument that that was negated by the fact that she returned from the garage into the house (she was trapped in the garage, and Gray said he knew it), nor do I think that the prosecution’s crystal ball is beyond a reasonable doubt when they say she fired “in anger” rather than self-defense.
I don’t understand juries. They let Casey Anthony off, apparently because they needed CSI-like perfection to convict, but then a different jury, same state, convicts Alexander who had been physically assaulted and threatened just minutes before, by a man who had put her in the hospital previously, and was verbally threatening her and approaching her at the moment she fired. Had I been on that jury, I never could have voted to convict. It’s just wrong.