Pointless Prosecution

I learned in law school that there are four primary reasons that we as a society prosecute crimes and punish people for violating the law — these are, in the end, the reasons for having criminal law in the first place.

• Specific deterrence — to prevent a particular individual who has proven a propensity for violating the law from doing so; “Get the guy off the streets.”
• General deterrence — to discourage other people (not the defendant) from committing similar crimes; “Make an example of him.”
• Rehabilitation — to alter the defendant’s behavior so that in the future he will not commit crimes; “Let him think about what he did in there.” (I’ve always thought it was odd that we have this idea that sending people to prison is somehow good for them.)
• Retribution — to punish the defendant for wrongful conduct; “He’ll pay his debt to society in time.”

To this, I have had a student add another possible reason to send people to prison:

• Welfare of last resort — when someone’s life sucks so bad prison is actually an improvement in his life circumstances, he will be encouraged to commit a crime. For such a choice to be rational, a person would need a life that is already very violent, racially polarized, bereft of meaningful economic opportunities, and to assign a very low value to personal liberty. Of course, people make irrational choices sometimes.

So then I read about stories like this one. George Danaa is the sole survivor of a head-on auto collision on PCH. His girlfriend died; the couple in the other car died. Danaa’s car did turn left into oncoming traffic. No one knows why, not even Danaa. He suffered brain damage in the collision and does not remember what happened very well. Was there an equipment malfunction? An obstacle in the road? Heavy traffic? Did Danaa make a bad decision? No one can tell, not even forensic reconstruction experts using the available evidence. They could determine that no drugs or alcohol were involved in the collision. This does not mean that Danaa was not at fault. It means that no one can figure out whether he was at fault or not. That, it seems to me, is a precise fit for the concept of “reasonable doubt” and Danaa should have been acquitted.

But he was convicted of vehicular manslaughter and served two years of a three year sentence, all of it while awaiting trial. It is likely a case of the jury seeing three deaths and deciding there was no one else to blame.

What was the point? Danaa doesn’t remember anything about the event. It was an extraordinary sort of collision to result in three deaths and a very serious personal injury. Just being involved in that sort of thing is a significant deterrent to future risky driving, whether Danaa was at fault or not. No one will see a conviction for circumstances as uncertain as this and alter their behavior. Danaa’s conduct, as best we can reconstruct it, is not one susceptible to retribution, since he does not know what, if anything, he did wrong. It certainly hasn’t been good for him to lose his job, his girlfriend, have the guilt of maybe having killed three people, and to put a conviction on his criminal record to effectively remove him from the pool of people who can be gainfully employed (he had been the manager of an auto dealership). And because he had come from reasonably comfortable circumstances, he didn’t need the “welfare” of the very minimal material support provided in jail during his pre-trial detention.

I get it that people died. He may well be at fault. But prosecuting him for something like this does not seem to have been a useful endeavor.