Crime, Punishment, And Lawsuits

     About a year and a half ago, there was an assault on a teacher’s aide in a Florida high school. You may have heard about it. The teacher’s aide, Joan Naydich, is a middle-aged, middle-size white woman. The attacker, Brendan Depa, is a giant teenager: 6 feet 6 inches tall, 270 pounds worth of thug. He inflicted a host of serious injuries upon Naydich – five broken ribs, hearing loss, and a severe concussion – and to add insult to injury called her a whore. The attack was caught on video, and subsequently went viral. Depa was arrested, indicted, and tried for aggravated assault and battery, a felony.

     Well, just this past Tuesday the affair reached something of a conclusion: Depa, who had been convicted of the charge, was sentenced to five years imprisonment and fifteen years’ probation. Were the story to end there, there wouldn’t be much more to say about it, unless one were dissatisfied by the leniency of the sentence. Such assaults have become uncomfortably frequent in America’s government-run (a.k.a. “public”) schools. At least this one eventuated in punishment for the guilty party.

     But wait: there’s more!

     The teen’s mother blamed the school district for failing her son.
     “They are punishing that he is Black, they are punishing that he is large, and they are punishing his disability,” she told the local newspaper after the sentencing. “I think he needs help, and I think he needs treatment. But I don’t think he needs to be put away in a prison where he’s going to be taken advantage of or harmed.”
     Depa filed a lawsuit against the school district, alleging that educators failed to create an appropriate treatment plan to address his prior violent outbursts and behavioral challenges.

     Only in America.

     Time was, it was understood that the penal system exists to protect the law-abiding from the law-breaker. Time was, we would not have expected a convicted felon, or one of his relatives, to accuse the school system, or the state, or society at large, of being responsible for the felon’s deed. But this is the Year of Our Lord 2024, Gentle Reader. Brendan Depa, who had faced charges for several previous violent assaults, is black. That’s supposed to be a “Get out of jail free” card. When a duly constituted court and jury find such a person guilty of a crime, it’s committing “structural racism.” And the poor little thing is autistic, to boot! How could we be so cruel as to put him behind bars?

     No one dares to ask what this violence-prone moron was doing in an ordinary public high school. No one dares to ask by whose decision he was admitted there, nor after what host of meetings, deliberations, and counsel from attorneys. And no one dares to suggest that the persons responsible for his proper disciplining are not the school district officials but his parents. Wait: he does have parents, doesn’t he? If not, who filed the lawsuit?

     I’m going to make a prediction: At some time in the future, Brendan Depa will once again be “justice-involved.” He’ll commit another assault, possibly even a lethal one. I fervently hope his assault on Joan Naydich in February 2023 will not be forgotten. I hope with equal fervor that his “mother’s” claim that the school district, not her little darling, was responsible will be remembered as well. But I won’t give odds on either.

     On the subject of crime and punishment, let’s have a few words from H. L. Mencken:

     Judge Frederick Bausman, of the state of Washington, a very intelligent jurist, suggested a way out. All crimes, he said, should be divided into two new categories: those which a reasonable and otherwise reputable man, under the circumstances confronting the accused, might be imagined as committing, and those showing only deliberate and gratuitous criminality. Under the first heading would fall many crimes of passion and many ordinary thefts. Under the second would fall the doings of the Chapmans and Whittemores [two notorious murderers of the time – FWP]. The man who commits the former is now often used too harshly; the man who commits the latter is almost always used too softly. What sense is there in the old rule of evidence that the record of an accused, save he go on the stand himself, may not be brought against him on his trial? It is hypocritical and vain for juries consider it notwithstanding. It is unjust, for the record often contributes to a sound judgment, as it did in the Whittemore case. The important thing is not to play a game according to a set of tight and stupid rules, but to punish and put down crime. The way to do that is to proceed swiftly and harshly against professional criminals.

     Mencken wrote that in 1926. The nation was relatively civilized and peaceful at that time. (Yes, despite the gang wars brought about by Prohibition.) I wonder what he would think of contemporary criminal jurisprudence? If habitual and professional criminals were often treated “too softly” in that era, it did not seem to impact public safety to a huge extent. Today things are rather different, to say the least.

     A Brendan Depa is often treated leniently despite the severity of his crimes. At some times it’s because of the offender’s race; at others because of some pseudoscientific finding of a mental defect; at still others for political reasons too sordid to explore today. Leniency gives him no real incentive to change his ways. But the justice system exists to protect the rest of us against the likes of him. Leniency doesn’t just perpetuate the risk he poses us; it actually elevates it, for his violence gets him something he desires. Why else would he aggress?

     In discussing the execution of the two murderers he mentions in the above, Mencken makes a penetrating, difficult-to-refute statement:

     The State of Maryland did not kill Whittemore because he was a moron; it killed him because he had demonstrated conclusively that his continued existence was incompatible with the reasonable safety of the rest of us. What difference did it make whether his criminality was due to a lack of intelligence, or, as in the case of Chapman, to intelligence gone rancid? The only important thing was that he was engaged habitually, and apparently incorrigibly, in gross and intolerable attacks upon the public security.

     The same thing could be said about many habitual criminals. And on that note, I yield the floor to my Gentle Readers.