I find myself in a bit of an ethical dilemma this weekend, reading the story of a convicted domestic terrorist who will be spending quite some time in jail. (Bear with me for a bit and the title will make sense.)
A radical activist who helped set a $1 million fire to protest research on genetically modified crops was sentenced Thursday to nearly 22 years in prison _ even more than the prosecution recommended.
Marie Mason decided to “elevate her grievances beyond the norms of civilized society” through fire and destruction, U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney said. The case _ which was prosecuted as domestic terrorism _ was “about an abandonment of the marketplace of ideas,” he added.
The 47-year-old Mason, of Cincinnati, had acted on behalf of the radical group Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, which has been implicated in a spate of similar crimes, mostly in the West.
First, a disclaimer. I really dislike P.E.T.A. I’ve always felt that their radical and sometimes violent tendencies bring a pall on legitimate animal care organizations. ELF is worse than that on a whole new scale. They truly are terrorists, in my opinion, and deserve everything they have coming to them. With that in mind, you might think I would read the above story and not have much to say except three cheers for justice. And you’d be right, had I not read this piece on the subject from our friend Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, which is what leaves me in the aforementioned quandary.
Her defense team professed shock at the sentence, calling it far out of proportion to other sentences for the same crimes. Well, that’s the point. For far too long, courts have coddled domestic terrorists of certain political strains. Where some have rightly thrown the book at anti-tax militias and those who commit violence at abortion clinics, leftist terrorists who commit arsons and bombings for their causes have gotten treated as misdirected darlings.
No longer, or at least not in Maloney’s court. The judge got this exactly right. Political terrorism undermines democracy at its roots. Instead of pursuing change through debate and organization, Mason attempted to frighten people into surrendering to the will of a tiny, fringe movement.
Well, thanks for just ruining my day. Here I was, perfectly content to read that story and be happy about it, but then you had to go and mess it up for me. You see, Ed points out something that immediately puts me off about this story, and the root of it lies with other types of criminal activity altogether. Long time readers will already know that I am opposed to pretty much all hate crime legislation. I won’t go into some huge, long winded diatribe on it here, but suffice it to say that I feel people need to be prosecuted for the things that they do; not for the what they are thinking when they do it. And citizens deserve equal recourse to and protection under the law, without some victims and their families getting special treatment – including additional law enforcement resources or stiffer penalites – for the same crime just because of what the perpetrators were thinking. This, of course, brings us back to Ms. Mason.
Just how stiff of a penalty was it that she received to draw such theatrical exhortations from the judge at its pronouncement? I did some checking, and it seems that you can burn down quite a bit of real estate in this country and not draw all that much time in the crowbar motel.
From the US Sentencing Commission Annual Report for 2003, the average (mean) arson sentence was 82.7 months (6.9 yrs) and the median sentence was 60 months (5 yrs), for arson as a primary offense in 82 convictions/sentences (http://www.ussc.gov/ANNRPT/2003/SBTOC03.htm, Table 13).
Actual length of imprisonment for repeat offenders (Category III criminal history) spent an average of 11 years for arson with 8 years being the average for all categories (Table 14). This is compared to the average murder sentence of 20.6 years (median 15 yrs), sexual abuse 6 years (median 3.4 yrs), and assault 2.5 years (median 1.25 yrs).
In fact, all sorts of cases turned up where where really heinous arsonists have been caught and handed considerably lesser sentences. In fact, one Maryland case had a conspiracy among several arsonists who wiped out an entire development causing more than ten million dollars in damage for the stated purpose of keeping black people out of their neighborhood.
GREENBELT, Md. – One of five men charged in an arson spree at a suburban Washington housing development pleaded guilty Thursday to taking part in what prosecutors said was a crime aimed at black families moving into the neighborhood.
Jeremy D. Parady, 20, pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to commit arson. Prosecutors planned to ask for nearly 10 years in prison and restitution of $4.18 million. Sentencing was set for June 14.
You can view some other ATF cases against arsonists who caused more mayhem and received closer to the median sentences here and here.
I did find another arsonist, Adam Seth Anderson, who received a similar penalty of 22 to 25 years in prison. But his crime spree went well beyond simple arson. Anderson was also convicted of “kidnapping, robbing, raping and sodomizing a 21-year-old woman, stabbing her 19 times, and leaving her for dead after throwing her body into a tributary of the Siuslaw River west of Walton.”
So, in the end, the news of the ELF case is ruined for me. We need to keep in mind that our system of justice has very different standards for “true” terrorists who are foreigners committing acts of terrorism either here or abroad. These differ from the treatment owed to American citizens committing crimes – no matter how terrorist in nature – on American soil.
Had the judge simply said that it was one of the worst cases of arson he had ever seen (he did not) and that she was a terrible risk for recidivism (he did) then one could almost forgive him. I say “almost” because the amount of burning done doesn’t match up to many of the other referenced cases. And in terms of repeat offenders, a “domestic terrorist” won’t fill the bill. They may or may not burn something else if they can find a suitable target which their co-conspirators can agree on. An actual pyromaniac is pretty much a sure thing to light something else up. Instead, the judge decided to launch into a speech showing how serious he is about domestic terrorism and deliver a sentence which was in excess of even what the prosecutor requested.
Similarly, Ed has chosen to cheer on this decision as a victory for justice, showing a judge who is as serious about punishing “left wing” terrorists as they are about people such as Timothy McVeigh or KKK members. Had he simply said that all arsonists needed to have much stiffer sentences, I could get on board with it, but he did not. Emotionally, I could get behind taking every member of ELF and locking them up with the keys being dropped off the end of a long pier. Unfortunately, to be consistent with the idea of equal justice for all Americans under the law, we have to disapprove of the judge’s handling of the case, as no favor was done for our system of constitutional law here.