Crime and Punishment

I think it was several years ago that I discussed here a strange jury service. I was actually the foreperson of a jury in Massachusetts for a hybrid civil-criminal trial of a sort that no longer happens.

The occasion for revisiting is that a man named Wayne Chapman has been ordered by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to be released from civil confinement. By a most odd coincidence, the man who was the subject of my judgment was also named Wayne Chapman, and the question before us was the same question before the SJC, should he be released from civil confinement. Both men were held at the Massachusetts Bridgewater State Hospital and both had been convicted of raping children. However, they are not the same person. The Wayne Chapman who is in the news today raped boys, whereas my Wayne Chapman raped girls. Let's call them WC1 and WC2 respectively.

There was a difference between their situations back then, and another difference was created since. WC1 had been sentenced to a definite term in prison, which he long ago completed, whereas WC2 had been given a suspended sentence in exchange for accepting civil commitment for "one day to life." Back then, for whatever reason, it was fashionable to think of child rape in terms of a disease model rather than a criminal model, and the smart people thought it was curable. The idea was that WC2 would undergo "treatment" until he could be deemed "no longer sexually dangerous" and then released.

WC1 fell afoul of this concept from the opposite direction. When he walked out of jail after completing his sentence, the state police were waiting for him with a civil commitment order based on his being a "sexually dangerous person," landing him in the same situation as WC2. Feel free to argue the rights and wrongs and constitutionality of both cases, but I'll just say the pragmatic situation is that the general community is committed to the idea that the only way either of these guys should ever emerge from incarceration is feet first.

Back when I sat in judgment, the law was that they had the right to petition for release once a year, and that it was up to a jury to decide if they were still "sexually dangerous," which the judge informed us meant "likely to re-offend." During deliberation I sent him a note asking what "likely" means and he responded that it means "more than 50% probability." Obviously this is an impossible judgment to make but I can tell you that if jurors actually believe the probability is more than 0% they're going to tell the judge they decided it was 51% and he's staying right where he is.

Since then they've changed the law and it's now up to 2 "experts" to decide if he is still "sexually dangerous." In the case of WC1 they apparently got 2 experts to decide that he isn't, so he's free to walk. In fact the prosecutors are trying to keep him in on a new charge of exposing himself to a prison nurse, which might be bogus, who knows? But they are following public opinion in trying to find a way to keep him locked up.

Oh yeah, the "treatment." I don't know specifically what treatment they gave to WC1, but WC2 was offered the opportunity to have a device attached to his male member to measure his degree of erection. He would then be shown pictures of little girls, and if he got an erection, he'd get an electric shock. He would then be shown pictures of adult women or heterosexual couples doing the nasty, and instructed to masturbate. This was supposed to change him.  Anyway, he refused to participate. Obviously, there was no scientific evidence for the effectiveness of this "treatment."

This all seems very silly to me. The simpler way to go about this would be to decide whether child rape should get a life sentence and if parole should be possible. That may be a harder question than you think at first glance. Both the WCs are extremely nasty but it turns out that a couple of years after I encountered him, WC2 found a jury that let him go. I think he moved to Chicago or Detroit or some such faraway place and I don't know what happened after that.

I tell this tale without declaring my own judgment about these matters. But it may give you a couple of things to think about.