You're Wrong About - What Even Is Justice? with Amanda Knox

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

This week, national treasure Amanda Knox talks with Sarah about what the American legal system claims to be for, what it’s actually doing, and what might be possible in the future. They entertain the most heretical ideas they can think of, which mostly seem to be about unconditional love and mercy. And at the end, Sarah’s ghost boyfriend Clarence Darrow turns up. Here's where to find Amanda:Labyrinths (podcast)Support us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalYou're Wrong About Spring TourBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/labyrinths-getting-lost-with-amanda-knox/id1494368441http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

But Amanda, you're forgetting Satan. Some ideas come from Satan! Welcome to You're Wrong About, I am, as always, Sarah Marshall. Today, we are talking about justice, specifically the question, what even is it? What do we mean by this word we say? And I am talking about it with Amanda Knox. I was really excited to talk to Amanda about this because she is doing work that I really admire and am excited by about what justice has been

and what has passed for justice and also what it could actually look like. And that's a lot of what we're going to get into here today. This episode, not in a super intentional way that was planned out but in a way that became apparent after the fact, I think is a lovely companion flavor to Juvenile Justice, our last episode with Josie Duffy Rice. It's a Justice Month and we just decided to go with it.

So if you enjoyed the last episode, this one hopefully will build on that. If you haven't listened to it yet, they might go well together. Try it out. Have a Justice Day. Before we get to the show that I wanted to tell you a little bit about my life for the past week, we have been starting off our spring You're Wrong About tour and I got to do shows in Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis with special guest Ryan Ken, Jamie Loftus,

and of course my producer and personal musical genius friend, Everyone Gets One, Carolyn Kendrick. It has been an amazing first leg. I'm really excited to do more shows. We are headed to the East Coast next. We had a really amazing time doing these shows. All of the audiences were absolutely feral in the best way. If you were one of those audience members, thank you.

And if you were in Minneapolis and I hit you with an Easter egg, I'm very sorry and sue me if you need to. We're very excited to start the East Coast leg of our tour and we sold out our show in Brooklyn. We added another date that's April 28th and then we have a show in Philadelphia on April 30th, which we still have quite a few seats for. And also Burlington, Vermont, May 16th.

If you are anywhere near Burlington and would like to see a Bimbo burlesque of 20th century history, you should come. We'd love to see you there. It's been really exciting to get to do more live shows after the four we did last fall and there's really nothing better than being in a room in front of the people who make this show possible,

who allow us to ask these questions and to have these sitting on a park bench type conversations about what our culture is up to and how we can try to be better. And I just appreciate that so much. I appreciate you so much. It has been just the best to get to see you and I'm excited to see more of you.

And until then, here's this week's episode. We're talking about justice. It is the conversation of my dreams and I hope it is the conversation of your dreams too. Welcome to Your Wrong About, the podcast where we say, hey dictionary, hold my beer. And with me today is Amanda Knox. Hello.

Hello. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. I'm excited. I am so excited too because we had a couple conversations about what you might want to talk about on here. We talked about potential stories and topics. And ultimately what won the day was my seemingly wasting your time

but very earnest question. What even is justice? Yeah, I'm really glad that you posed that question because from my experience, justice as a concept, as a word is something that everybody thinks they know what it means and that we all agree on it. And yet when you actually dig down into the fine details or you go down certain rabbit holes, all of that unravels

and suddenly a lot of people are in great disagreement and also the whole idea, the whole concept itself seems to be on really shaky ground. Because again, I think it's one of those really big concepts that we all sort of take for granted. Right. And it's like, it's one of those big words that I think you almost feel embarrassed to ask

for a definition of fairly young. I strongly suspect that as with so many other concepts in American life, it means different things when different people say it. But I'm really bad at getting guests to introduce themselves before the very end of the show. I'm going to try and get better at that starting now. Cool.

Amanda, who are you? What do you do? My name is Amanda Knox. I am a journalist, a criminal justice reform advocate and host and producer of the podcast Labyrinths. I never really anticipated becoming interested in the issue of justice. I was a poetry and language student

up until I was wrongly convicted for a crime while I was studying abroad. So I spent time in prison. I spent time in the criminal justice system and it has left deep impressions on me that have impacted my understanding of what justice means and how it is exercised in our society. Well, first of all, thank you for coming on the show.

Thank you so, it's so great to have you. Thanks. Something that I feel as part of this conversation is this way of life that I certainly feel like I was trained to have where like, you just kind of assume everything's going good over there. And you hear about occasional scandals, but they tend to be reported at least when we were growing up

with this air of like, oh my goodness, corruption in the district attorney's office of all places. How could it be? Yes. Yeah. It feels like the American way, at least for sort of like people who are white and middle class enough or whatever other adjectives,

you know, that allow them the privilege of being ignored by the legal system, that it's possible to believe for even your entire life that things are going okay over there. Right. You'd think that the people whose job it is to enforce the rules would be people who would be rule followers.

And so, but of course, human beings are more complicated than that bias comes into play. And so those of us who like me grew up in the suburbs, never had to encounter crime at all, never had to think about it. Just sort of put it on faith to take it for granted that here was a system that its very, very purpose is to be fair.

One of the good things about the rise of interest in true crime of late is exposure to the fact that no, it goes awry all the time. Right. And like, awry is kind of the whole thing. It's like, I mean, not the whole thing. Like there are some fair trials out there, but it's like they're really fighting against the odds,

I feel like, in the United States. And it's very impressive that they happen at all. But I mean, people who listen to this show know that I bring up law and order. Honestly, I could bring up law and order once per episode, and I don't, and I'm proud of that. So I was like really raised on law and order. And I think that it's such a great example

and certainly does not stand alone of also kind of the American media diet where you watch a character like McCoy, played by Sam Waterston, who's like so passionate about justice that he's kind of like doing shady shit all the time. Like you zoom out and you're like, like when I watch it now, I'm like,

McCoy is not a good lawyer. Like he's always doing stuff that's like borderline unethical or just is unethical, but like, you know, that he can kind of get away with. Right. And you know, and then with every dirty cop on TV as well, we're supposed to be like, well, but like he loves justice and he has to bend or break the rules

in order to serve justice. And it's like, but then why is it that for the defendants, justice is the rules, among other things. But you're right. Like I think the thing that is super interesting about that for me is there's almost this subconscious recognition that human beings are imperfect. And so the people who are enforcing the law

are going to be imperfect in their enforcement. But that same kind of empathy doesn't extend, I think, as often to the criminals who are doing the terrible things that we see either in real life or on TV. And that obviously leads to an imbalance of where our sympathies lie when we hear about people breaking the rules.

Cause like the whole concept of justice, the distinction between right and wrong and the fair consequences for each of those things, it all comes down to what we determine to be the person's intent, the why they broke the rules. And it seems like we allow and we even enjoy when people break the rules and do the wrong thing

if they have the right intentions. But we don't allow and we absolutely do not enjoy when people do the wrong thing for what we determine to be the wrong intentions. And then if you start talking about intentionality and unintentionality, then you can go down a very, very interesting rabbit hole. My basic perspective,

and a lot of people are going to hear this as being like really overly sympathetic to murderers. And what am I going to say about that? Maybe it is, but basically, I think that like in a sense you can argue, and I would like to, that nobody really commits murder on purpose with like full intentionality,

full rational premeditation. Cause I think truly there can be no rational premeditation for murder. For the most part, I think you're doing it because something is wrong with you. Either sort of external circumstances that become internal fairly quickly, can either put us in a situation

where murder is one of the things or any kind of killing, is the thing that is somehow most within reach at that moment, which I feel like happens with a lot of armed robberies that escalate into shooting someone and them dying, and avoid the pass of tense, Sarah. And then that if you look at someone who's like,

I killed them all and I love killing, you're like, well, you're not well, right? Can we agree this person is not thriving? Right. Right. They're a broken meat robot. Exactly. Yeah.

And I feel like that's just like, that's a weirdly controversial argument. I think America is a culture so built on violence and particularly male violence and male domination and you know, genocide at various points that we kind of have this sense that like violence is power, violence is good, violence is necessary.

He who does not resort to violence is a sucker. And then I think that that gives us, just adds to the confusion when we talk about people who kill because it kind of results in this glorification of them where we kind of, we act like they have more agency than they do. And I think really anyone who kills out of circumstance

is closer to us than we think and anyone who kills because they like it is like one sick puppy. Yeah. And that doesn't mean that they can responsibly be free but it, you know. Yeah. Like no one would choose being Henry Lee Lucas.

Right. Which is a bad example because he seems like kind of an underachiever but whatever over like a life of connection and like giving and receiving love, right? Absolutely. Like not to be corny but it's true. Like people love to just like have relationships

and watch a sports game and watch their babies walk in the grass and have a picnic. That's what we want. Nobody would choose violence and mayhem over that and the people who kind of imply that that is what anyone could rationally prefer. Like that's what worries me.

Totally. And I'm 100% in agreement with you. Yeah. What does it mean that somebody doesn't have the agency that we think they have when they are doing something antisocial and what does it mean that no one in their right mind would want to be a antisocial person

and what does that mean? Like what are the consequences, you know, psychologically and socially if we start thinking about people as being broken people instead of evil people. Right. We're beyond the practice of an eye for an eye, right? We all recognize that there are circumstances where an eye for an eye in terms of, you know, judgment

about a person's wrongdoing and the just consequences for that wrongdoing don't make sense. Maybe it's an accident. Like maybe someone was accidentally, you know, killed because they were driving along but like a kid ran in the street and the kid got hit by a car.

Do we then say, well, the kid died so we're going to go and now kill your kid in order to equal that out? That used to be a form of justice and now I think we recognize that that doesn't make any sense. But as soon as we start thinking, what are these circumstances that make sense to not delve out the eye for the eye mentality? Is it a child?

Maybe it's a child who committed murder. Well, do we want to give a child the same kind of punishment that we would give to an adult? That's one of those mitigating circumstances. So what counts as mitigation? There's a really famous case of a man, I forget his name, who murdered his wife, I believe, and then went up into like a clock tower

and just started shooting people at random. I think it was Charles Whitman. Yeah, yeah, Whitman. He goes up this clock tower, starts shooting people at random and then eventually is either shot or committed suicide. But he left a note prior to killing his wife and doing all of this saying, there's something wrong with me. I have this uncontrollable urge to kill people

and I don't know why it's beyond me to stop this impulse anymore. Please examine my body. Otherwise they wouldn't have done it. And lo and behold, they examined the body and he had this tumor pressing down on his amygdala that was like forcing him to feel this impulse to kill that otherwise if he had a perfectly healthy brain, he wouldn't have felt that.

And I think that anybody who hears that story tends to imagine that this man isn't evil the way that we would assume he would be if he hadn't had that tumor. But then here's the tricky part. What's the difference between a brain where there is a tumor pressing down on the amygdala that causes this person to feel the uncontrollable urge to kill people

and a brain that is just hardwired to make you feel the uncontrollable urge to want to kill people? The only difference is that the tumor itself is an obvious thing that we can pinpoint that says this is what's wrong in the brain. For the other person, we just don't know enough about the brain in order to identify what is going wrong there. But Amanda, you're forgetting Satan. Some ideas come from Satan.

But even that, even if it was Satan whispering in your ear, are you responsible for your actions or is Satan responsible for your actions? It's true. So how responsible are you for that? And all of these kinds of conversations make people really uncomfortable. I can't tell you the number of times

I've had this conversation with people and they say, okay, Amanda, you have me convinced but you can't go around telling people that because if you do, our whole society would crumble. I would love to believe that you have that power. This conversation in the past eight years that's very loudly,

justice for the innocent and then quietly, if you listen for a while, you hear justice for the guilty. Right, very quietly. And there's actually a really interesting, so I'm really immersed in the Innocence Project world, the Innocence Network. And there is admittedly a kind of split in thinking.

There are those within the Innocence community who really want to focus only on those that we can prove are innocent. And then there are lots of cases where the evidence no longer exists to prove innocence one way or another, but what we can prove is that there was a great amount of misconduct that was influential

and ultimately fundamental to a person's conviction are those cases that are worth exploring when we can't prove 100% that they're innocent. And then there are even further factions within that group where they say, well, absolutely, there's issues of, well, the person was guilty, but they just got an insane sentence.

Like, let's be real, they stole a coffee pot and they got 30 years in prison. Isn't that worth our time? Isn't that justice? The whole question of deserving, in my view, should not be a part of the conversation when it comes to criminal justice. For me, the question, rather,

is how do we have a safer society? How do we deal with the threat of violence instead of how do we, you know, try to retroactively do justice to the person who did the wrong thing? Currently, we have a, you know, a retributive justice system where it is fundamentally understood and it is absolutely said,

like the U.S. Supreme Court has said, our criminal justice system is founded upon the principle that everyone has the free will to do right and wrong. And therefore, when we meet out justice, it means that the person who did wrong deserves to suffer. It's essentially the definition of our criminal justice system. It doesn't sound great when you put it that way.

It doesn't sound great, but it also is totally based upon, like, I mean, even religious concepts, if you think about it, like, there's ideas of karma. There's ideas of heaven and hell. Like, our religious systems are also based upon this principle that we all are free to be good or bad. Then, therefore, there are not just, you know, worldly consequences for our actions,

but there are also eternal consequences for our actions. And so, all of that is based upon this principle of us of being free, like, basically being gods of ourselves. And I think that I don't think that any of us truly is a god of ourselves. And even if we were, I don't think that that's actually what is for the good of society,

like, addressing the issue retroactively instead of thinking about using a model that looks proactively about how to make society a safer place. Because if you're thinking about the retroactive model, it doesn't really matter if there's recidivism. It doesn't matter if there is people come out and are renewed threats to society. What matters is that you addressed the wrongdoing

through punishment. That is what justice looks like. But then, of course, there are lots of people putting forth other kinds of models, like the restorative model or lesser well-known is the quarantine model. Which is? Well, okay, so I've described already the retributive model. The retributive model is,

you did bad, so we get to make you suffer. Justice is suffering. Tit for tat. Right. One of the ways that people argue that it's okay is because they're like, okay, well, because it's deterring other people and it's deterring the prisoner from doing it again.

But, of course, we know that that's not actually what's happening a lot of the time. In fact, it's way more important the idea that somebody would get caught. That's more of a deterrent than the severity of the punishment for a crime. So putting aside the retributive model, there's a different model called the restorative model.

It's really gaining popularity since Black Lives Matter. We're seeing that practiced a lot in schools, and I know that simply because my mom is a school teacher and she's having to explore new ways of dealing with students who interrupt and interfere and potentially do things like come to school with a gun. There's a new understanding. There's a mitigating factor is that these are children,

so they shouldn't just be punished when there is wrongdoing in a school setting. Okay, so the restorative model is based upon the principle that when a crime occurs, it's not just a matter of an individual who is responsible for wrongdoing. It recognizes that when there is wrongdoing, there is a sort of rip in the social thread

that needs to be repaired socially. It also recognizes the victim, much more so than the retributive model because the retributive model is primarily focused on punishing the perpetrator, not on restoring the victim. In the restorative model, the victim is not only put in a position of restoring themselves, it's seen as the socially responsible thing to do

to help the victim uplift themselves and sort of heal from the harm that was caused them and part of that healing is being empowered or given the opportunity to have a direct role in rehabilitating the perpetrator. And a lot of people are really behind this, especially when, again, when it comes to juveniles because they don't want to resort to automatic punishment

as being the way that we deal with threats to the social fabric and we recognize that children are impulsive and they don't have their brains fully developed as adults, so we should be treating them. Instead of dealing out punishment, we should be attempting to cure the problem, right? Like thinking about the little broken human and saying, what can we do to fix the problem?

How can we make this person rehabilitate it as quickly as possible and removing potentially punishment from that equation? A lot of people don't like the restorative model because they feel like what it means is there aren't consequences for bad actions and the restorative model is not as motivated to inflict bad consequences on the perpetrator

and so a lot of people feel uncomfortable, they feel like, and indeed, in practice, this often happens where ultimately the restorative model is set up to fail because in order to address harm, you have to have resources and time and energy to interact with the root causes of that harm in the individual and school teachers like my mom do not have the time and resources to address

the deep existential needs of their problem students. So it's a little bit set up to fail. How does that compare to the quarantine model? So the quarantine model, it is what it sounds like. Like you treat crime, you treat wrongdoing, you treat criminal behavior, particularly violent behavior as the threat that it is in the same way that a virus is a threat. So that idea is when we identify an individual

who is infected with criminal behavior, we quarantine them until it is possible to rehabilitate or cure them. So this is the model where there absolutely are consequences for bad actions and those consequences are swift and those consequences put the needs of the social order and the innocence first. However, the difference between the retributive model

and the quarantine model is our feeling about the perpetrator, the person infected. It's not your fault that you are infected with criminal behavior. You don't deserve to be punished for criminal behavior. What you deserve is to be rehabilitated and cured and quarantined until you are safe to be around other people. So in this model, and this is the model that I think makes it makes a ton of sense.

The one thing that arises from that though is that things like the death penalty or life in prison without parole, all of that that is a result of the retributive model no longer makes any sense whatsoever and in fact is a moral outrage. In this model, there are consequences which I think makes people feel better.

Ultimately, the person who is the perpetrator is isolated and treated as someone who is in need of treatment and the consequences that are meted out to them are dependent upon how they respond to treatment. So you wouldn't keep a person who recovered from COVID in quarantine indefinitely when they had recovered and they were clearly no longer spreading. But you would if someone was still exhibiting symptoms of COVID.

That is a different model where instead it's not about like we are punishing the COVID by quarantining you for a year. You know, you are addressing the COVID and you are prescribing treatment that makes sense to the individual case. Mm-hmm. And I feel like one of the kind of core ideas at play in all this that often goes unstated is like

and this actually I've been researching the Reagan's so an example I can cite for this is John Hinckley was recently, I think, you know and entirely released from parole supervision and he's just like out. He's living his life. And I mean Hinckley is a good example because the entire country was affected

by, you know, the president being shot. So like if you believe the assessment that like he's fine, he's good, he's not dangerous, he just wants to like write his folk songs and put them on YouTube. I think there's still a core unstated belief in all this that like it is somehow insulting to the Reagan's that he's like out, you know, having a white chocolate mocha Barnes & Noble.

Right, because we want people to fit into these nice little boxes where they are defined by the worst thing they've ever done. Yeah, and what's that about? I think this is something that restorative justice is attempting to address is the fact that our society is really, really bad at acknowledging harm done to victims. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

And the only way that our retributive model knows how to acknowledge the harm done to victims is by how horrible the consequences are to the individual who perpetrated the harm. That's the only way that our society institutionally officially acknowledges harm to victims. And there is no like institutional foundational support that goes to victims.

We have this really impoverished like social order that doesn't acknowledge the harm done to victims or celebrate their survival or grieve together for the loss. Like it's something that we are really bad at doing. Yeah. And we sort of leave victims to their private grief and don't go out of our way to help them recover. As a result, I feel like victims feel that they need something.

Mm-hmm. The only acknowledgement, the only satisfaction that I get is if this individual who did this harm to me is forever branded with the harm that they did to me. I mean, I really agree. And I hadn't ever thought of it that way before. But I mean, you just look at how American society is organized and how like, you look at how people have to pay

for a life-saving surgery or organ transplants with GoFundMe's, you know. So you can't just like be raising money for a kidney transplant. You need to like zhuzh up your kidney transplant. Yeah. You have to submit to being in a documentary about it in order to pay for it.

Yes. You do. And this kind of, I mean, I talked about this in a bonus episode we did recently with Josie Duffy-Rice about cereal and sort of how it kind of started this trend. We're on the one hand, you could say like, wow, little old podcasts fixing our legal system.

But also you could be like, what has it come to that like the best way, arguably, to like get someone exonerated is to like make it a viral documentary moment. Right. Like that's not how a system should work. No, absolutely not. Because not every one of us can be a viral sensation.

Well, and also, you know, and then similarly to how there are like amazing people who did commit murder, you know, they were like, yeah, I was committing an armed robbery. He did the moment. I made a terrible choice. I'll regret it forever. I'm a nice person.

Right. Or, you know, you're like, I was in a cult or I had postpartum psychosis or so many things. There are also so many people who are innocent of the crimes they were convicted of who just like suck and they'll never get a podcast about them. Or they will, but people won't care. Exactly.

No, they won't care at all. Yeah. Again, I can't tell you the number of people I met in prison who were absolutely guilty of crimes and absolutely struggling with impulsiveness and bitterness and rage. But where did that rage come from? Right.

So many of the women that I was imprisoned with were victims of crime before they ever committed a crime against anyone. And they were victims of abuse and neglect. I mean, I've delved into this topic from a lot of different angles. Like what is justice for? Who is it for?

What is it for? And again, it looks different to each person. Like I interviewed Samantha Geimer. Are you familiar with her case? She was assaulted by Roman Polanski in the 70s. Yeah. Yes. And when she reached out to me

to be interviewed for labyrinths, she very explicitly said like, I want to talk about how the criminal justice system used me, a child, after I had already been used and abused by another person. And weirdly, that put me in a position of feeling like I had more in common with my own rapist than I had with the people who were supposed

to be meeting out justice for me. Like that kind of experience that can only be lived. Like it's so hard to imagine and yet it is lived and it is lived time and time again, calls into question the very foundations that again we take for granted. Yeah. I think the legal system maybe functions

for a lot of us like that one friend you have who you're like, wow, this person like always needs solids from me, but like someday I'll need a solid and they'll come through. I just know it. And then like nine years later, you're like, hey, could I have a ride to the airport? I really need it.

And they're like, no. And you're like, oh, why did I think that? It just was, I just felt better living in a world where I thought that would happen. But something I thought about a lot in retrospect was the kind of viral moment in the summer of 2016 when the victim impact statement by the woman who we later learned with Chanel Miller

went around, it was published on Buzzfeed and became viral online. And I remember talking about it at work, talking about it with friends. It was kind of one of those things that kind of defined the conversation. And you could kind of see the conversations that we were just learning to have

and then the ones that we weren't ready to have, I think. And then of course how the sentencing played out in that case caused a lot of outrage even though I think it's really interesting that at the same time that that was happening and also having conversations about how the criminal justice system should be less retributive.

And so we have a judge who recognizes the humanity of the perpetrator and decides that the quarantine cure model is effective in this case. And then of course he gets just slammed and people accuse him of racism and all of that. And it's like a lot of people saying things like if Brock Turner had been black,

he would have been given a much harsher sentence. And it's like, well, yes, that's absolutely true because racism is just a part of the system. But why does that mean that we should meet out the harsh sentence? Like what we want is we want to set a precedent for meeting out not harsh sentences that recognize the humanity of the individual.

And we should do that more. Yeah, right. And that I felt like that was the thing that felt so hard to articulate in the moment because it was like, because all of these stories there about more than literally what's happening, which I think is why neurodivergent people

struggle to understand the news. But you know that this was about America as well, like trying to get it through our thick skull that like rape is endemic, campus sexual assault is everywhere and nobody seems to care. And if this assault hadn't been stopped by... By two strangers who happened to walk by, yeah.

Exactly. And the whole story and that that was so huge that it was hard within that moment to articulate like why are we saying that we need to behave at our worst? Like why do we get so upset actually when we see the legal system functioning as it should because the problem is that we're seeing scarcity in action because we're seeing...

Because I mean, I say this a lot about the O.J. Simpson trial. It was a pretty fair trial. The defendant had a bajillion lawyers. They could contest everything. They could do their own science. Wouldn't it be great if every defendant was O.J. Simpson, although I realize that would like jam up the airwaves, but it's not like people watch TV that way anymore.

Anyway, it could be all trials all the time. But just that when someone finally is afforded the correct resources, it actually makes us really angry. And that we lack the sort of... The cockeyed optimism, but you have to be utopian, I think sometimes to even imagine what could possibly be

because what we have is the result of people's decisions that like what if young black men retreated? Like swimmers at Stanford. Like rich white swimmers at Stanford. And the question of like, are we upset just because this is another example of how white men become so horrible because they are cushioned from any sense

of their actions having consequences as they grow up. Or are we also upset because we're seeing a rare instance of someone receiving mercy and we feel like we just know that no one else is going to get it. But it is a good thing. How do you fix that disparity? How do you fix that disparity and recognize the humanity of all individuals

who find themselves in the circumstances such as one Brock Turner? And is it by being equally harsh or is it advocating for equal mercy or equal not mercy? Right. And then also so much of what you could see in that statement was really Chanel Miller talking

about how the legal system had used and abused her. Right. And it felt like we weren't ready to talk about that yet and to be like, hey, like maybe, as you were saying, like there's no support for victims. There's no support institutionally for trauma unless you're like, yes, I will use my trauma to have an unpaid job working for you

trying to put someone in prison. Yes. And acting like that should bring about your satisfaction and your healing when in a practical way, I would think the vast majority of victims would argue that, no, that's not even close to a healing process. Yeah. I mean, what would be nice is if each individual victim

were given the resources to discover those healing practices that aren't just being used as pawns in the justice system. So like, say something bad happened to you, maybe you are given some time off of work, paid time off of work so that you could just spend some time working on yourself and healing yourself. One of the things that's absolutely true

of being a victim of something, whether it's of crime or the criminal justice system, it involves existential crisis. It involves a sudden feeling of loss, just in whatever it is that was taken from you, be it, say, you were raped, it's that feeling of security in your own body. Or if it's your freedom that's taken away from you unjustly,

it's that sense of, well, I lost time and I lost the even faith in other people. There's so much that is lost from an experience and you have to grapple and process with those things as a victim and it takes time and it takes energy. And to have all of that on top of the burden of being a human being is incredibly difficult. And so of course, victims are struggling to heal

and struggling to find that practice. Like, do you have the time and do you have the resources and is society recognizing that need in you? Or are they just saying, tough luck, but the perpetrator got 500 years, so how do you feel about that? So even if he's a vampire, you know, we're good. Yeah, we're good.

Yeah, and I feel like we have been sold so hard on this idea that the prosecutorial arts are intrinsically healing, that it feels kind of sacrilegious to disagree with it. And this is like, in America, we're not even gonna get into the Whigs situation in some countries, but in America, where I am famously from, the judges usually sit higher than everybody else. They look down at you and they wear big black robes

to convey a sense of authority. Right. And I think that judges should have to wear Tommy Bahama shirts so that we're all reminded of their humanity. Judges should dress like Guy Fieri, who is the most human of us all outwardly. And also that so much of what happens in exonerations in America is like having to sort of circumvent the state having hurt feelings

because you're having to tell them that they did something wrong in the past. And it just feels like so dad-like, so classic dad to like, you can't tell him he's driving in the wrong direction. You have to be like, oh, I wonder where that Dairy Queen is and then allow him to realize that he missed the Dairy Queen. Yeah. I mean, to steelman that argument,

to steelman why people put so many protections in place and, you know, do the whole ritual of the being aloft and wearing the robes and all of that and even legalizing outrageous things like the Alfred plea. I don't know if you're familiar with the Alfred plea. I am, but I bet not everybody is. I would love you to tell us about it. Okay, so the Alfred plea is I came to understand it

through the West Memphis three case where there was really compelling evidence that these three young men who were wrongly convicted, but of course there wasn't evidence enough for them to 100% prove their innocence despite the fact that everyone was coming around to the idea that of course they're innocent, this is outrageous. Because innocence is even harder to prove than guilt,

arguably, in many cases. Absolutely. It's so hard. It's hard to prove a negative. So as the prosecution's case is unraveling and while there is one of these individuals, one of the West Memphis three is sitting on death row potentially facing execution,

they offer what's called the Alfred plea, which is simply a guilty plea for an innocent person. So the state acknowledges that the person is innocent but the innocent person is pleading guilty so that the state is not found to have been an error in convicting them. And so it's agreed, it's kind of like a settlement that the state doesn't have to really acknowledge

their innocence, but the person who is taking the guilty plea is professing their innocence and we all agree that they should just be let out of prison. It's incredible. Like that's what it means. That is what it means and it's all staged to protect the interests of the state so that the individual can't sue for compensation.

They can't sue for wrongful and imprisoned them. They remain officially convicted murderers. It's to foil those get rich quick schemes where you get wrongfully convicted of murdering three children, spend 20 years in prison and then profit. Right. So it's designed to protect the interests of the state.

Why, if we're really steelmaning that argument, why would that be important? Well, some people argue that the fundamental reason why those kinds of things are put into place and why there are so many protections for cops even when they do wrong is that for society to function, people need to have respect for the law. And if you do not have respect for the law

because it is being implemented by imperfect humans, then there's going to be chaos. And like I got news for you guys. There already is chaos. Exactly. Have you been in a Ross recently? Like there's nowhere left to go. And I feel like there are people listening who are like,

maybe I'm just uneducated and I'm not a lawyer, but that sounds insane. It does sound insane, but it is absolutely real. And I, yeah, and I think it's like, you know, I know that it's real and I also feel that it's insane. Nothing against insanity. That's kind of insulting me and, you know, many of the people I love most have troubled sanity.

It's something else. It's just like willfully counterfactual. One could also argue that people lose respect for the law when the law gets it wrong and doesn't admit it. So it really depends on like transparency. Like for the sake of emphasizing the correctness or the respect we should have for our legal institution, is the idea of closure, that there should be a limit

to how many times a person can appeal their conviction. Simply because there has to be respect for some kind of sense of conclusiveness. And if you treat wrongdoing and you treat criminality as a something that needs to be attributed against like that, we need, again, the retributive justice system. But like in, again, in the quarantine model, that doesn't make any sense because if you have a disease

and you try to cure it in one way and it doesn't work, you keep trying to cure it. Or if you realize that you've made a misdiagnosis, you don't just persist with the treatment that is not going to address the issue you're going to instead treat it differently or let that poor person out of the hospital who's not actually sick.

Like that sense of conclusiveness for the sake of conclusiveness out of respect for the legal system, flies in the face of moral reason when you look at the criminal justice system from a perspective of being in the service of protecting people and curing people from the virus of criminal behavior.

Yeah. I just, at this point, we'll have recently put out an episode on juvenile justice with Josie Duffy Rice. Cool. I was like, you know, it's funny to me that like you would think people would more want to believe the hopeful thing,

which is that you can have juvenile offenders who commit serious violent crimes, you know, and yet that they can mature into lovely people and they can heal and they can receive, you know, the care and the resources that they need to become safe, to like live in a society and to kind of contribute and to love and be loved and kind of feel connected.

Right. And she was like, yeah, but people like certainty more than they like hope, basically. And I was like, ah, fuck, because I think that's completely true. And I think that what you're saying is also really indicative of this and just like, and this idea of like,

we have to protect the reputation of the law because if people know the truth, they won't respect it. And if they don't respect it, then they'll be anarchy. Right. And certainly, you know, based on the events of the last couple of years,

I think like the events of 2020 kind of is reflective of this, which is like, well, then like if the truth will cause anarchy, then like let there be anarchy. Right, right. And also what a deep unfaith in human beings. I'm reminded of when Ricky Gervais was at one point asked by some, you know,

person arguing for religion, like, well, if you don't believe in God, what's keeping you from raping and murdering people? And Ricky Gervais was like, I rape and murder people just as often as I feel like it, which is never at all. Which again, goes back to the sense of like, I feel like we act like the legal system

must be in place, or else people are just going to be raping and murdering people like crazy. Yeah. Or we can educate people from a young age to like have love and to be supported by each other. The vast majority of us are not raping and murdering and being violent towards each other.

And when we do make mistakes, like we hope that people recognize that we've made a mistake and we don't, we didn't mean to like be hurtful. And like when we made a mistake, often it's coming from our own place of hurt. I don't know. I don't believe that human beings are antisocial

as some people claim them to be. Right. At least I hope not. Yeah. I mean, you know, and it depends on the human, but like, I think that if I truly weren't afraid of the law and consequences, I would shoplift from Whole Foods a lot.

But like, that's all I would want. Yeah. But again, all of these models for justice that aren't based upon retribution, it's not like there are consequences. It's just the question of like, where does the justification for that consequence come from and what does it look like?

So prisons themselves are criminogenic. It's not a place where people are learning how to function better in society. Right. According to at least one statistic I've read, active corrections officers in the United States have similar PTSD rates to active service veterans of Iraq.

And like, of course they do, right? Do we want that? Like we really look at sort of who this is serving and how it's not serving victims. It's not serving the people we incarcerate. It's not serving the people in the communities that run the prisons. Right.

Yeah. So who is it serving? Right. I don't know. It's serving a sense of patriarchal pride, certainly, and fear of change, I guess. Absolutely. And like belief in the cleansing power of retribution, I think.

Here's the thing. I don't even know if people who truly believe in retribution actually care about whether or not the person who is experiencing institutional suffering benefits from it. Like I really, I feel like the people who really, really believe in retributive justice don't care about the outcome.

All they care about is the feeling of inflicting suffering on someone who has caused suffering. And ultimately, that's what it comes from, but I really, really would love for people to, well, again, it kind of goes back to that question of, here we are in a society where you're a sucker and you don't address violence with violence if you don't respond to violence with violence

and we've glorified violence. We've glorified the infliction of suffering on other people and we've called it just. I don't know about you, but I find that to be a really, really despicable thing. Yeah. And I'm just surprised that it's taking so long for other people to see that.

And I think that what's really gonna push this forward is just further and further understandings of how our brains work. I think the more we can pinpoint when and where the impulse to be anti-social comes from, I think the more we're going, like, you know, it used to be that when a person had a tumor or an epileptic fit in their brain,

people just assumed that they were possessed by demons and burned them at the stake. We have certainly, you know, arrived at a better place and we're on a good trajectory, I think. Knowledge is power and knowledge is also compassion. I feel like you set me up perfectly for the contribution that I wanted to end on because when we first started talking about this topic,

I was like, I would love to get a chance to talk about one of my favorite pieces of legal writing, which is Clarence Darrow's closing address in the Leopold and Loeb trial. Oh, okay, let's hear it, yeah. So Leopold and Loeb was one of our many trials of the sanctuary in the 20th century. This happened in the 20s.

It became very famous. It was the inspiration for media properties that, you know, have yet to come to an end, including murder by numbers and compulsion. And it was two teenage boys who were both brilliant who were in a queer relationship, although that wasn't really reported on at the time, who decided with Loeb being the dominant one of the two

and who kind of called the shots, decided to prove how smart they were by committing the perfect murder. And then, of course, got caught immediately because they were two rich boys and they fucked up all over the place. Right, of course. And so Clarence Darrow came to work for the defense.

His job, effectively, was just to save them from the death penalty. It was a bench trial, which means this is heard by a judge rather than a jury. And it's not will they walk free, it's will they live. And so he gave what in total was a 12-hour closing address. And it was what I call the so-you're-telling-me argument where he's basically kind of in this rhetorical feat

that builds over time basically saying, like, okay, so you're telling me that this is the most barbaric inhumane murder ever to happen in Cook County. I mean, we say that about most murders in Cook County. Right. So, like, you know, but whatever, let's say that this one really is.

Why not? Let's say that. Sure. And now you're telling me, because he's summarizing the argument the prosecution has made. Right, right, right. That the state has no choice but to show his little compassion

for the defendants as they showed for their victim, which is, like, legal rhetoric that you still see today. Right, absolutely. Like, they showed no compassion for their victims, so we show no compassion for them. Yeah. We should be psychopaths, too. Right, exactly.

Which is, like, a classic eye for an eye, classic retribution. And Clarence Darrow is, like, doing what I love. He's naming the unnamed. And he's, like, why should the state behave like these two murderers who we hate so much? Like, that's who we're supposed to emulate? Are you serious?

Right. With respect? So here's Clarence Darrow supporting all the stuff we've been talking about, I would say. Cool. Can your honor imagine a sane brain doing it? Can you imagine it coming from anything but a diseased mind? Can you imagine it as any part of normality?

And yet, your honor, you asked to hang a boy of his age, abnormal, obsessed of dreams and visions, a philosophy that destroyed his life when there is no sort of question in the world as to what caused his downfall. I know, your honor, that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together.

I know that a pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without disturbing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame. I know that all life is a series of infinite chances,

which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it. Neither has any other human brain. But I do know that if back of it is a power that made it, that power alone can tell. And if there is no power, then it is an infinite chance which men cannot solve. Yeah.

It a little bit reminds me of this recent essay that I wrote where I talked about how we talk about psychopathy. We condemn people who commit evil deeds as evil, and we call them psychopaths, and then we gleefully sentence them to decades in prison or to the death penalty, and we gleefully rejoice in what ultimately is horror. And then we feel so superior.

And I think what's interesting about that is reflecting upon what this attorney that you're quoting here is saying, is he's like, also our psychopathy is part of the ripple effect of how we're all interconnected. Right. Like, we too are acting in evil ways. We're all interconnected,

and we are all influenced by each other. Like, first of all, the harm that is done to us changes us, but also the harm that we inflict, the punishment we inflict changes us. Also, the thing that is a result of us being interconnected and having the brains that we have is that we get to be conscious of these kinds of things. We can be aware of how the things we do influence us

and the things that we do to others can influence them. And so for me, the question is not who deserves what. It's what is the outcome that you want? What can I individually and us collectively do to arrive at a place that is not what we deserve, but is what we hope for? And I think that the only way to do that is to recognize people are not gods of themselves

and everyone's worst actions are a process of both unconscious and conscious things that are not entirely within their control and is a lot left up to chance and luck. On the flip side of that, treat these problems as problems to be solved, not problems to condemn. Yeah, and I love that you emphasize this idea

that to me is so central to this piece of legal rhetoric that we're all connected. Because I think an idea of a retributive justice system is based on an implied belief that we're not connected, that we can separate each other into groups, that I can look at someone and think, I'd never be like that. Individuality.

Exactly, our national myth, the individual is king and we hate weakness. The way the legal system functions now allows us to have various classes of people who were allowed to wish harm on and feel comfortable kind of feeling aggressive towards, feeling hate towards, wishing violence upon, you know, kind of believing in like the magic of execution

as if the world has made a better place when they die. Right. Because really it feels like more of a system of culture than a system of governance. That like we have the system that tells us like it's okay to hate these people, like you have these thoughts within you, but they don't make you bad.

You're a good law-abiding person and the only people you hate are criminals and therefore you're fine and you're one of the good ones. Right. But don't become one of the bad ones because then we're gonna have to swat you like a fly. Then we get to hate you, yeah. Maybe the like existential anxiety driving a lot of this

would go away if we could be like, I have bad thoughts and that's okay. We all do, yeah. Yeah. And that we're all people together. And like I'm lucky that my bad thoughts don't turn into impulses that I can't control. Yeah.

And to be able to say like, and if they did then like, you know, that I deserve to be able to like get help for that. I don't think there's really the resources people need for that even if we had that kind of self-awareness. Reimagining what the criminal justice system is for and what it's supposed to do, what's the ideal outcome is,

honestly, I feel like it's an inevitable thing that is going to happen. But right now it's still pretty controversial to say this kind of thing. So we're at an interesting space. We are, we're in an absolutely wild moment in every way including this one. And I love that we've just,

that we've just spent a couple hours kind of saying a lot of the most inflammatory things we can think of. And for the most part, they're like very nice things. Yeah, I know, I know. How dare you care about people that we don't want to care about, yeah. Yeah. And I guess, I don't know,

and my final thought to add to this is just that like connection feels good. Love feels good. Like it feels better to love people than to hate people. And it feels, you know, it feels scary to connect. And I get that, it feels scary to witness all the complexity that is within yourself and just how like we have all been trained

in our own ways to kind of open up to ourselves and kind of react and fear and discipline and unlearning that is really hard. But just like, I don't know, this conversation felt really good. I just feels good to like open that door that like painted shut door a crack and like look into this world that can be

where we actually try and address problems by trying to see more of people's humanity rather than having a culture that shows us that it's like dangerous to think about it at all. Right, it's heresy to consider that someone is more than the worst thing they've ever done, yeah. Yeah, so thank you. Well, thank you.

And I was so honored to be on the podcast. So it's so refreshing to find someone who's open to these ideas instead of just like vehemently opposed just for the principle of the thing. So yeah, no, I really appreciate that. Yeah, it's like living in a culture where people don't believe in jogging.

Not that I like jogging, I hate jogging, but imagine I liked jogging. Right. And you're always looking for people to jog with and they're like, oh, I guess we could walk but then in one day you're like, no, we can jog together. And they're like, no, that is impossible. What would happen if people started moving this quickly?

You're a bad person if you jog. And that was our episode. Thank you for listening. Thank you for making it through another winter. We love to see you out there. Thank you so much to Amanda Knox for being our guest on this episode and taking us on this journey.

You can find more of her on her podcast, Labyrinth, Getting Lost with Amanda Knox, and I really recommend the experience. Thank you so much to Miranda Zickler, Light of My Life for editing help on this episode. And thank you as always to Carolyn Kendrick, producer extraordinaire. We'll see you in two weeks.

Thank you.