Boys... and this one boy

I hear your Laura has been getting interested in the way our culture treats its boys, Bush. Good for her. It's an issue that constantly crops up in those mens' weekends I've been telling you about. As a society, we have this obsession with male toughness, and we train our boys from an early age that to face the world with strength they have to compete, they have to excel; they have particularly to supress all their emotions--particularly their fear, and pain, and anger. They learn to stuff these things down inside, where they fester, and all too often explode.

So my attention was grabbed yesterday on the television news, Bush, by the image of the prosecutor in the Christopher Pittman murder trial, down there in South Carolina. The case has been picked up eagerly by the media because of what they tagged "the Zoloft defense" (shades of the old Twinkie defense in San Francisco, no? Don't they love those easy tag-lines?) which claimed that the defendant, 15 years old, had been acting under the influence of that drug when he shot-gunned both his grandparents to death in their sleep.

Here's the image that got to me: the prosecutor, in his summary before the jury, pointing a shotgun at a mannequin and narrating the incident as he saw it, with venom heavily emphasized as he reenacted how the boy--then 12 years old--pointed the gun at his sleeping grandfather and (with great drama) "shot him… IN… THE… MOUTH."

A foul deed, Bush, by any standard. And brutal. Granted. But what I responded to--and I suspect the jury, too--was the anger and hatred this attorney projected on the boy he was accusing. Even from the seconds-long clip I saw, this was no rational, lawyerly argument appealing to the jury's intelligence and common sense. This was a raw appeal to their emotions, an intense and bitter call for pitiless revenge. I was frankly stunned by the rage with which it was delivered.

Perhaps this is the task of a prosecutor. Vengeance. I don't know. I don't claim to know much about criminal prosecution. But this was a grown man, a trained legal mind, summoning all his considerable power to ensure the condemnation of a boy. A boy who was twelve years old at the time of the crime--and we know that the physical brain structure of children of that age is not the same as that of an adult, that there are certain faculties it simply has not yet developed. This particular boy, too, had been abandoned by his mother at an early age, and had a poisonous relationship with his father. Punished, not too long before, for bad grades at school, he had armed himself with a kitchen knife and attempted suicide when captured by the authorities; had been administered mind-altering chemicals to settle him down, and sent by an abdicating father to live with his grandparents; he had been "hearing voices", and before the crime had already shown violent responses in resisting discipline from them.

Okay, Bush, I know the argument: you can't blame all the bad things you do on your sad history. You have to take responsibility for your actions. I know all that. And don't get me wrong, it's not that I condone or excuse the boy's behavior. Not in any way. He is clearly in desperate need of a strong adult hand, and of some kind of societal rebuke and correction. But this is a CHILD, Bush! Twelve years old at the time of the murders; a mere fifteen when brought to trial as an adult. Did he deserve these bully tactics from a prosecutor hell-bent on conviction? To have this kind of merciless venom spewed on him? Did he deserve to be sentenced to thirty years in jail? Thirty years! And there were those who would have eagerly applied the death penalty.

So tell me, Bush, what kind of a nation are we, that acts with such vengefulness against our children--even those who have committed heinous acts? Is this the "compassion" that you like to talk about? Is this an administration of justice that we can be proud of? I say no. Even his surviving grandparents, the in-laws of his victims, said no. They said, had they been the victims, they're sure their surviving in-laws would have said the same about their killer: No. This is not justice. This is no more nor less than vengeance. It can also be seen, when you pause to reflect on its broader meaning, as a dreadful indictment of the way we rear our sons.

You talk a lot about the values of our society, Bush. And I suppose, if you base your values on a literal interpretation of the Bible, this kind of vengeance might seem appropriate. An eye for an eye. But don't forget, Bush, what the Lord in that same Bible sayeth: Vengeance is mine. I myself was taught to understand those words to mean that vengeance is too terrible a power to be entrusted to all-too-fallible humans.