Deborah McGraw, the victim of a petty larceny, expressed the perfectly natural desire to give the alleged perp, Dallas Jarrett, a good smack. Just one would do, and then they would be square as far as she was concerned. Kanawha County prosecutor Stewart Altmeyer conveyed the offer, jokingly perhaps, to drop the charges in exchange for a smack. Jarrett agreed. Oh boy.
From the Charleston Gazette :
According to [Kanawha County Prosecutor Mark] Plants, Altmeyer jokingly conveyed the victim’s suggestion to Jarrett and his lawyer. Jarrett was represented by assistant public defender Katherine Kessell, according to court records.
Jarrett and his lawyer accepted the offer, Plants said.
“Although the victim was happy with the outcome, this result is just unacceptable,” Plants said. “The Legislature does not allow for physical contact as a form of punishment, and even if it did, a judge would have to make that decision, not a prosecutor.”
Turns out, the joke was on Altmeyer, who has been suspended without pay for one month, and will have this follow him around forever.
While “alternative” sentence options have presented problems before, this one is particularly curious in that the proposition was to dismiss the charges, leaving Jarrett free to go about his life as if nothing happened, in exchange for a smack. He agreed to it. His lawyer agreed to it. The victim agreed to it. No judge involved. While the situation is not significantly different than that in Bedford County, Pennsylvania, where two women were forced to stand outside the courthouse with signs saying that they stole money from a 9 year old on her birthday, in order to get the prosecutor to recommend probation, it somehow has a different feel to it.
Clearly, a good smack by the victim isn’t one of the potential sentences available for the offense. While a victim may ask for it, Altmeyer had no authority to offer it in exchange for dismissing the charge. Legally, it was very wrong.
But something strikes me as imperfect about the analogy. That corporal punishment isn’t part of the sentencing structure seems disingenuous. If a person is put to death for a crime, how bad can a smack be? It may not be painless, but it’s quick and then it’s over. Everyone goes home reasonably happy. There’s no sense about this case that the prosecutor applied undue pressure to coerce the defendant into agreeing to the smack. This wasn’t rammed down his throat. Everyone was amendable to the resolution.
In trying to find a conceptual ledge to hang on to, to differentiate the wrong of a non-permitted punishment from the right, the best I can come up with is that the Bedford case appeared to be highly coercive while this case seems to have left everybody satisfied. But that hardly seems to be a sufficient rational basis to justify why one seems so wrong while the other, not so much.
And yet, this smack doesn’t strike me as such a bad way to resolve the case.
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As a non-lawyer, I’ll take a smack at it.
1. The Bedford case involved public shaming, in which the defendents were compelled to SAY things they probably don’t mean, in order to win leniency. That forced recantation/apology stuff seems kinda Soviet to me. Though I don’t know if the “we stole” signs were a direct request from the victims’ side or just something the prosecutor cooked up. (That would make a difference in my mind.)
2. The face smack has a dignified history that calls to mind gentlemen settling their differences with a duel, or a lady setting boundaries for a cheeky cad. Especially if it’s agreed upon by all interested parties, one quick, theatrical slap across the face strikes me (get it?) as much more honorable and direct than the State-sponsored idiocy of a court trial.
That’s not bad at all. I particularly like the face smack having a dignified history. Well done.
How many times have we had clients who paid off the bad check or repaid the embezzled funds or otherwise made their victim whole and then no charges were ever brought – either because the victim simply didn’t report the crime or because the victim refused to help the prosecution which couldn’t go forward without assistance?
This is private, victim-initiated, by all accounts wholly agreeable to the accused, the victim, and the line prosecutor (whose role was really facilitator). And nobody got hurt (stung, perhaps, but I assume the slap wasn’t given with brass knuckles and caused no injury). The sole problem, really, is that a private resolution went public.
I don’t think any of that applied in Bedford. Nor, by the way, for another instance, is this like the prosecutor in PA who decided that forced reeducation camp for teens caught sexting could avert felony charges.
Well, I’ve never had a client who paid off a bad check, but that’s just me and I don’t want to detract from your otherwise sound point.
Very cost-effective. I think they should legislate it as an alternative sentencing scheme. A kick in the ass should be an option too.
I’m not particularly comfortable with the private remedy aspect, but I like the idea of corporal punishment being on the table. Somehow, we’ve come to believe it inappropriate and not acceptable, but sending someone, perhaps a father and family breadwinner to jail for years, months or even days (however many days it takes to get fired from a job) can be far more cruel and unusual than a lashing that may be painful, but ends.
I’ve been ranting about this for years. There is a wide range of offenses for which it seems clear to me that corporal punishment is much better than jail time. This includes most juvenile offenses, where under our current system, we issue toothless threats to offenders (warnings, counseling, probation), sometimes for repeated offenses over several years, before finally dropping the hammer and sending them to jail. Surely it would be better to have some middle ground between toothless warning and life-altering imprisonment. As Dan says, corporal punishment hurts for a while, and the offender learns that his misdeeds carry real consequences, but then it’s over and he can go on with his life.