stevesbets

As a poker player, I have known the importance of being process oriented (as opposed to results oriented) for many years now. Today I was laughed out of my Crim Law class  (by a vast majority of my classmates) for suggesting that much of our justice system is totally results oriented and therefore wrongheaded. I’m not sure if my classmates simply did not get what I was saying or if they actually disagreed strongly with me, but I cannot imagine how there can be widespread disagreement over my simple (and seemingly obvious) point.

For those of you totally unfamiliar with the concept of being results oriented, novice poker players are often heard saying they never want to play AA again because they lost with the hand the last few times they had it. This is a simple and extreme example for just how silly it can be to let your strategies be dictated by results oriented thinking.

In Criminal Law we have read some cases about manslaughter (reckless homicide) and criminally negligent homicide. To commit these (very serious) crimes, you need not purposefully or knowingly kill someone, you can simply act recklessly or negligently in doing SOMETHING (like blocking fire escapes), then if that “something” leads to someone’s death, you rot in jail. I will briefly summarize a relatively famous case to make my point.

Defendant was the owner and caretaker of a trendy club. The main entrance featured a revolving door and while there were various emergency exits throughout the property, some of them were blocked by tables or locked so as to prevent patrons from sneaking out without paying their tabs. One night a fire broke out through no fault of the owner, and many people were killed. The court upheld a jury verdict sentencing the man to 10 years in prison per death because his recklessness (conscious disregard of a substantial and unjustifiable risk) created the situation that along with some other happening (the fire) caused many deaths.

My argument is, that a system that punishes recklessness or negligence only when the worst case scenario (death, serious injury or whatever else) occurs is far from ideal for multiple reasons:

a) The punishment for the unlucky person whose club does break out in a fire is a jail term only fit for the most malevolent in our society (many years-life in prison)

b) the myriad other people that act in the exact same or similar manner receive no punishment whatsoever

I submitted that a far better system would punish people for the expected harm of their action, and not simply for the random result that their action may (or in most cases may not) lead to. So in the fire case, 418 people died in the club. Let’s say that firefighters determined that this was bound to happen if a fire broke out in that environment. Lets say that an unstoppable fire or other such disaster breaks out on approximately .01% of crowded nights at the club. If the punishment for manslaughter is 10 years per count, then the punishment for recklessly setting up your nightclub should be 418 (number of potential deaths)*10 (years in prison per death) * .01% (chance of such an event actually happening). In the end, assuming my admittedly random chance for a fire is correct, this would lead to a 5 month sentence for the club owner. Further though, it would lead to 5 month sentence for anyone with a similar club setup that recklessly endangers lives in case of emergency. It is far more equitable for people to be punished for risk they take in the proper proportion, rather than for the one unlucky person whose club burst into flames to do the jail time for every club owner out there who takes such a risk.

This suggestion seems to me to be the only fair way to punish people but was harshly rejected by most of my classmates. I assume the poker players here will agree with me, I wonder if other lawyers will not.

One of the primary objections of my peers was that there should be deterrence for such action that can lead to mass death. I totally agree, I think my system actually allows for more deterrence because whenever a club is set up in an objectionable manner, the owner can face jail time even if no harsh result has yet occurred. This presumably would make owners far more conscious of having a safe setup than the current system of fines for violations of administrative codes.

I hope like me, it outrages you that we live under a legal system that would fold pocket aces. A system in which 1000 people can commit the same reckless act and, even if they are all caught, 999 will escape with a fine or perhaps no punishment at all. In the meantime the one unlucky guy who had the dice come up snakes eyes gets life on rikers island.