Maimonides’ “Guide for the Perplexed” warns against misplaced mercy, as compassion for the wicked amounts to cruelty to everyone else. Unfortunately, this sound advice is falling from favor in many contexts.
Look at baseball’s sign-stealing scandal. Players suspected of cheating received immunity, in part due to union rules impeding suspensions. The union likewise shielded cheaters in the past by barring the league from testing for steroids. This is a narrow definition of “protecting” player interests.
Misplaced mercy has spread far beyond baseball. Advocates tried to make it harder to suspend students after observing suspension negatively affects the academic performance of suspended students. Former Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the idea, trusting teachers’ and principals’ judgment about when and how to punish.
Similar policies nationwide have proved calamitous, protecting bullies from suspension unless they actually drew blood. A student could tell a 12-year-old girl to “Suck my —,” but the school could not suspend him unless he forced her head to his crotch. Teachers with toothless authority requesting students do their work or even sit down and not disrupt class were met with profanity and threats.
These changes created winners and losers. Bullies escaped consequences, which benefited them but harmed the vast majority of students and teachers who just wanted to learn and teach. Shielding disruptive, defiant students reduced the safety, morale and instruction available for everyone else.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the legislation Brown vetoed. Schools no longer will suspend willfully defiant students from middle school next fall.
This ethos extends beyond schools. The incoming San Francisco district attorney has condemned long prison sentences that “destroyed communities, taking [parents], brothers, husbands, and sisters away from their loved ones.” He dismantled the unit prosecuting gang criminals and will not seek sentence enhancements against them.
These changes will … protect criminals from long sentences. What about everyone else?
These changes also will create winners and losers. It will protect criminals from long sentences, and keep their families together. What about everyone else? Although punishment takes parents from children, so does crime itself, and many of those children will never get to visit.
California cut its violent crime rate by almost two-thirds in the past generation by imposing longer sentences and limiting early release. For every three people murdered in 1993, two of them were not in 2014. That represents hundreds of thousands of people who still can see their loved ones.
Most people like this enhanced safety, and don’t want to lose it. They voted for Proposition 57, whose title promised “Parole for Non-Violent Criminals” and whose declared primary purpose was to “Protect and enhance public safety.” But while it confined parole to nonviolent criminals, it provided sentence credits for all, so murderers and other violent criminals can cut their terms in half, or more. And statutory redefinitions will shield many from murder convictions in the first place — and these apply retroactively.
Prop. 57 offered a compromise on juveniles, preserving adult trials but trusting judges (rather than prosecutors) to decide which violent juveniles deserved them. But the legislature then barred trying any of them as adults. Most courts justified this as furthering “public safety”; only one court in Ventura rejected it as directly contradicting the measure’s authorizing adult trials: “The Legislature cannot overrule the electorate” because “All power of government ultimately resides in the People.”
Sadly, the attorney general, the state’s chief law enforcement officer, filed a brief supporting the legislature’s overruling the people. The Supreme Court will decide whether the legislature can compel the release of an unremorseful, two-time murderer by his 25th birthday — if not sooner.
But lawmakers must show comparable concern for the players, students and citizens who keep the rules, lest kindness to the cruel end up as cruelty to the kind.
Mitchell Keiter is the director of Amicus Populi, which represents the people’s interest in public safety in cases before the Supreme Courts of the United States and California.
