The lynch mob

Ms Walters said in order for the community to move on, Parker needed to be punished for his crimes.

"That man, he's a poor excuse for a man.''

She said the future would be difficult for Parker's victims, the "poor, innocent little boys''.  [NZ Herald 15.8.13]

Ms Waireti Walters is a kuia, tribal old lady, at Pamapuria, where James Parker was deputy principal at the local school.  

James Parker was up for sentencing, having been convicted on multiple charges of sexual abuse including sexual violation of boys aged 9 to 16 at the time.  Justice Paul Heath gave him preventive (indefinite time) detention with a minimum non-parole period of 7 years.

Such were the crowds wanting to attend the sentencing that an adjacent courtroom had to be wired up for the overflow.  The Pamapuria gentry had travelled about 150 km from Pamapuria and environs to be at Whangarei High Court.  There were 74 charges against James Parker involving 20 victims.  The locals had waited through months of harrowing media coverage and district court hearings.  The district court judge decided that since only the High Court in Whangarei could deliver an adequate sentence he would send James Parker there.  The locals followed.

It is sometimes pointed out that one of the reasons we have courts with their rituals and order, tedious and all as it may be at times, is that they stand between criminals and victims.  The judicial system is what we have developed in place of the lex talionis, the law of the jungle, the eye-for-an-eye brigade, the lynch mob of frighteningly recent memory in numerous marginally civilised cultures including the USA.  It was as well, not only for James Parker, but also for justice, order and decency, that a High Court judge could preside and decide. 

But we perennially underestimate the extent to which frightened society needs to see people punished and put away.  Government departments and bureaucracy these days throw up all manner of debacles, heaven knows, for our delectation and rage, but none hit the headlines quite like some apprehended child abuser, or some recidivist out on parole who offends again.  It simply illustrates to the simple minds of Simple Sentencing devotees that they always were right all along.  What you have to do is punish, and in the current excruciatingly ignorant cliché, lock them up and throw away the key. 

Clamour for (another cliché) the voice of victims to be heard has led the courts into a procedure called Victim Impact Statements.  When the time for sentencing comes, we now typically get a string of Victims reading out their more or less literate, let alone logical, essays on how they think they have been permanently damaged and how they feel about it.  Sometimes if it is altogether too distressful, a lawyer will read it out for them.  I understand that the judge receives and vets these statements beforehand – but then we get anguished public statements from Victims who were not allowed to say what they wanted to say.  Hearing what they do get to say in court, I shudder to think what was edited out. 

And so it was that James Parker, over some hours sitting in the dock, was relentlessly and publicly humiliated by some of the righteous Pamapuria citizens.  Am I the only person in this country who finds this hideously distasteful and unnecessary ritual demeaning to us all?  Ms Walters contrasted James Parker to the local “poor, innocent little boys”.  Huh...?  It is pathetic sentimentalism.  I too am horrified at what James Parker did.  I make no excuse for him whatever.  He needs to be taken away from decent society and put into some serious reform programme among people who can help him.  Precisely how is Ms Walters’ silly sanctimonious tirade going to help?  She says the poor innocent little boys of Pamapuria will never be the same again.  In 10 or 15 years, she says, those “poor little souls” will still somehow be unable to cope... Ms Walters was somewhat unspecific in this area. 

I realise that we are often surrounded by this level of sentimental humbug, but it concerns me when the courts actually facilitate it and give time to it. 

(Justice Heath said) to Parker: "I could not help but notice that when you were listening to the victim you did not have the courtesy to look him in the eye. You simply sat there holding your head in your hands."

Oh please…  What posture then is appropriate for an utterly shamed, humiliated, defeated man, being led around like a sacrificial goat, sitting in the dock getting verbally stoned to death by judge, lawyers and victims?  I think in that situation I would have got up and walked out, hoping someone was there with specific orders to bludgeon me down for contempt of court and attempting to escape. 

I don’t want to make fun of victims of this kind of crime, of course.  But we have now a well-developed Victim culture in this country.  Victim has actually become a respectable thing to be.  We have developed a government-subsidised Victim Support network, and I suspect they do some commendable work.  But when you are a victim, surely the trick is to find ways out of it and away from it.  We seem to be encouraging victims in the view that their “childhood was stolen”, that they can never be the same again, that their lives were wrecked at the point of the abuse and cannot recover. 

Society however is replete with people who could have become Victims, but chose instead to fight their way back.  Part of that process very often is the decision not ever to be labeled a Victim, and certainly not to wallow in memory and bitterness.  These people generally don’t speak to the media, neither do they consider they have become authorities – or for that matter even hold opinions worth hearing – on complex issues of crime and punishment. 

Our courts and our judges, in my view, should know better than to give space to yet more victimizing.  Somehow at the hands of Justice Heath’s court this man has become labeled a “Monster”.  Yes, that makes people feel better too.  Deny his humanity, turn him into a non-person, an untermensch… does that sound familiar?  Then he doesn’t matter, you see.  Blinded by his deeds, blind also to any good or possibilities in him, all we seek is to have him put away and out of sight, forgotten.  I think the judge and the system ably assisted this. 

And now we can all feel righteous.  Perhaps even as righteous as the indignant, wounded victim-citizens of Pamapuria.