One of the saddest situations occurs when someone who is mentally challenged crosses paths with the criminal justice system. It’s simply not constructed to accommodate such people, and the many factors that comprise the structure of the law, from definitions of crimes to purpose of punishment, just don’t apply properly. But that doesn’t stop the system.
From MSNBC via Doug Berman :
From MSNBC via Doug Berman :
[Aaron] Hart has an IQ of 47 and was diagnosed as mentally disabled as a child. He never learned to read or write and speaks unsteadily.
Despite being a target of bullies, he was courteous, well-behaved and earned money by doing chores for neighbors, supporters said. His parents say he’d never acted out sexually.
Until one day in Paris, Texas, Hart, 18, was found fondling his 6 year old neighbor. After trial, the jury spoke the community, demonstrating its understanding of what is proper in addressing the needs of a severely retarded young man. They returned sentences on the 5 counts charged of three 30 year sentences and two 5 year sentences.
Jurors said they sent the judge notes during deliberations in February, asking about alternatives to prison, but didn’t get a clear answer. They believed the judge would order concurrent sentences, jurors said.
This sentence is staggering. So the choice was between a 30 year sentence and an alternative to prison? Even assuming concurrent sentences, there are a whole bunch of numbers between zero and 30, any one of which would have been better. But if the jury’s solution is distressing, consider the judge’s:
Lamar County Judge Eric Clifford decided to stack the sentences against Hart after jurors settled on two five-year terms and three 30-year terms, The Dallas Morning News reported Wednesday. The judge said neither he nor jurors liked the idea of prison for Hart but they felt there was no other option.Add ’em up, and it’s your basic 100 year sentence. In what rational sense can a judge, on one side of his mouth, claim he didn’t like the idea of prison, but then run the sentences consecutive to end up with a century? Perhaps I lack a basic understanding of Texas logic, but this makes no sense whatsoever.
What belies this nightmare is a gross misunderstanding of the nature of mental disability. Make no mistake, with an IQ of 47, Aaron Hart is profoundly mentally retarded. People don’t like to use that phrase, as it makes mental retardation appear ugly and undesirable. Guess what? It’s unfortunate that it exists, but it exists. That it hurts feelings is an unfortunate, but sometimes necessary, by-product. There is no coloration to Aaron Hart’s world that will make it the same as others, to allow him to share the understandings that others in society come to inherently recognize. This kid was severely retarded, and to consider him in any other light is absurd.
But then, even mentally retarded teens have hormones, giving rise to sexual urges they don’t understand but feel compelled to do something about. For Hart, it’s not like he could ask out a cheerleader and borrow dad’s car, hoping for the best. He manifested his sexual urge in a wholly wrong and horribly improper way. For the child fondled, Hart’s IQ was irrelevant. But for the criminal justice system, it’s at the core of our purpose.
Did Hart act maliciously, comprehending the wrongfulness of his action? He couldn’t do so even if he wanted to. It was beyond his ken, completely outside his understanding of the norms of behavior. To prosecute him as if he understood and meant harm is to ignore every purpose of the criminal justice system and undermine any sense of legitimacy to the use of police power. They beat up a retarded teenager because he behaved like a retarded teenager.
Certainly, Aaron Hart needs to be taught with utmost clarity that he cannot touch a child at any time, or anyone else without their permission. The parents of other children who are mentally retarded need to learn the problems that hormones will bring for their children, and teach them as well to behave properly. But to sentence a mentally retarded teenager to 100 years in prison serves no purpose whatsoever.
At least we’re supposed to feel better knowing that neither the judge nor jury really wanted to do it. Even though they did.
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Some decades ago, I worked as an aide at Mansfield Training School, an institution for the mentally retarded in Connecticut — since closed. There was a lot wrong with the place, but one of the things right about it was that it gave the people who really needed supervision what they needed in that regard. There were people who lived there who could simply not learn to comport themselves the way society properly demands.
I know of one instance where an aide was helping give one of the residents a shot — and the guy really did need his shot. But the guy panicked, at the last second (understandably; lots of nonretarded folks can freak out over a needle, too), and lashed out, randomly catching the aide on the eyebrow ridge with a very nicely-executed backfist, lifting him up and off his feet, and putting a couple of tears in his right eyeball’s retina.
(Two operations later, I was okay. Just to show how crazy the institution was, I was never allowed to be alone with the guy after that, out of the institutional fear that I’d take revenge. Do I have to mention that I had no desire to work over a half-blind, retarded septuagenarian? Probably not in this crowd. But it was a crazy place; he didn’t get his teddy bear back — it had been taken away from him by the “charge” aid, my boss, as a “negative reinforcement” — until I was cleared to go back to work, weeks later, and found it on the shelf in her office. She was shocked and felt betrayed when I told her off about that, and wrote me up for “insubordination.” She really thought she was doing the right thing.
Throwing Hart in prison is wrong in so many ways. Among the minor ones is financial — my guess is that it’s not just cheaper, but a lot cheaper to run a bed in a group home than in even in a Texas prison, and it’s entirely possible that a guy with an IQ of 47 could manage just fine with better supervision outside of an institution.
How is it even acceptable to take a guilty plea from someone this profoundly mentally retarded? Doesn’t Texas have some minimum standard of competence that any criminal defendant has to meet before he can waive all of his rights?
From the MSNBC article:
I take it that the answer is no, there’s no floor in Texas when it comes to mental retardation.
Ah, I missed that line in the article. The mere fact that the state of Texas would treat this young man as a criminal is as offensive to me as the outrageous length of the sentence. Is it just laziness? We can’t think of any better solutions for caring for this person with special needs and we don’t want to expend the effort to try, so let’s just lock him up for the rest of his life.
I’m with you on both counts. The sentence adds insult upon insult to injury.
Minimum standard of competence for defendants? Hell, we don’t have minimum standards of competence for judges!
If any jury can be put into a situation where they believe they have “no choice” but to do something they don’t want to do, the entire concept of having a jury is being violated. Juries exist to make exactly these decisions, and if the decision is taken out of their hands in any way, one effectively no longer has a jury trial.
When you study at the “heroes” of the jury system in any basic history or civics books, you see people like the William Penn jury and the John Peter Zenger jury — jurors who weren’t merely wise, but who had the spine to tell the system that they refused to convict under unjust laws, even when the laws gave them “no choice.” In other words, the celebrated heroes of the jury system are none other than nullifiers.
If the concept of nullification hadn’t been carefully hidden from Paris, Texas jurors, Aaron Hart could have received justice instead of retribution.
Now if I said that about Texas, people would be kicking my butt from here to eternity.
I second the comments about this case’s injustice, about accepting pleas from a person with an IQ of 47, and also about the jury’s role in nullifying prosecutions when justice requires it. We should have a robust public debate on when nullification is appropriate, rather than hiding it and pretending that it never occurs, or that it is never appropriate.
On another topic, why didn’t the judge give “a clear answer” about alternatives to prison? Isn’t it his job to clearly (and fairly!) describe the law to the jury? And why, when he didn’t give a satisfactory answer, didn’t the jury rebel? Have we become robots?
Finally, this case would seem to raise at least a colorable 8th Amendment question even under even today’s very restrictive precedents. The extreme depth of Hart’s retardation would seem to indicate that Atkins v. Virginia’s lack-of-effective-deterrence and lack-of-effective-retribution prongs would be satisfied, and the 100 year sentence is probably a life sentence (unless there is significant remission available).
BTW, does anyone know what Hart actually did? The article says “fondling”, but then the DA says that it was a “violent sexual crime”. Not to minimize Hart’s conduct, but, say, touching someone’s crotch through clothing is not anything like, say, ripping off her clothes, strangling her, and repeatedly raping her with a broken bottle. If we sentence both the same, or the former more severely (!), we have not only lost our minds, but we’ve created an incentive for rapists to act out their worst fantasies.
The only thing about Jury nullification, is that many people are unaware of it (at least in this part of Texas anyways). Especially when U.S. v Dougherty provided that the Defense can be prevented from informing the Jury about nullification.
As far as what he actually did, its hard to say. Do note that the vic was a boy, not a girl though. Makes you wonder if the sentence would have been different, though (for some people, that would make a considerable difference, sadly). I couldn’t find any actual documents, but there are reports that the kid’s (6year old) mother walked up on them with Hart’s pants down. Also of note is that the 6 year old boy is allegedly mentally retarded as well, though I couldn’t find any details.
To add insult to injury, the newspapers have reported that a few inmates are having to be moved to another facility away from the one Hart is in, and his parents have said he has been sexually assaulted several times. The veracity of any of these report have yet to be determined, though.
A mentally-retarded convicted child molester raped in Texas prison? I don’t think the veracity of the report can seriously be questioned.
Has this evening’s sunset been confirmed yet?