Legal Realism and the Criminal Code

-- By YoungKim - 29 May 2009

The American penal code has been hailed as a model of objective fairness, projecting consistency across criminal trials and establishing a systematic means for punishing society’s miscreants. As many would see it, the code is a symbol of our progressive democracy and the clearest definition of ‘the law’ – a set of rules forged under lofty principles of legality and proportionality, meting out punishment in an orderly, unbiased fashion.

Hearing this, of course, puts my bullshit detector on high alert. For all the praise we heap onto the criminal code for supplanting human impulse with cool objectivity, the act of punishing is a philosophical exercise invoking basic intuitions about what is or isn’t a fair outcome. ‘The law,’ in essence, is not a transcendent force which administers justice in a calculated, formulaic manner. It is instead comprised of the many individual biases of judges and juries, all making subjective judgments as to whether or not people deserve to go to jail. Rather than deluding ourselves into believing that the criminal code is the driving force behind our system of ‘justice,’ perhaps it would be better to discard it entirely and acknowledge that ‘justice’ is merely what a handful of men and women think it is. Doing so, I believe, will free the system to make better and more transparent decisions moving forward.

Limits of the Criminal Code

Part of the reason why the criminal code fails to supplant human bias is its misguided attempt at framing specialized rules around matters that cannot be reduced to formulaic analysis. Take mens rea, for example. The idea that mental states can be neatly sorted into ‘culpability’ categories (MPC 2.02) might seem appealing as a way of caging jury discretion, but ignores the reality that the human mind is a tremendously complex organism resistant to any single legal rule. For example, the MPC reserves a charge of murder to situations in which an actor purposefully kills another. To suggest, however, that a rule can be crafted to pinpoint precisely when a criminal’s mental state crosses some pre-determined threshold into purposefulness amounts to an adventure in logic. If a man shoots a gun at a tent filled with human shapes, can we really say with any level of certainty whether or not his mental state has risen to the level of conscious object to commit murder? With bold arrogance, the criminal code puts forth an authoritative answer to the human mind when philosophers and neuroscientists would be wary to pose anything more than theory.

Not surprisingly, the teaching of mens rea in law school is restricted to extreme examples designed to showcase the different types of mental states without questioning whether such categorizations are even meaningful. Examples like the blindfolded driver (recklessness) or the hired assassin (purposeful) are cherry-picked because they are easy to teach and fit snugly into pre-arranged buckets of mental states. The real world of criminal trials, however, is never so simple. Unlike the black-and-white examples common in first year criminal law courses, determining the reprehensibility of an actor’s mental state is a case-by-case inquiry implicating subjective beliefs as to whether or not punishment is deserved. Creating a ‘periodic table’ of mental states might quell our fears about discretion and abuse, but in the end, juries must still make difficult decisions based largely on gut intuition and common sense.

Where the Rules go Wrong

The criminal code justifies its many provisions under retributive and utilitarian models, but even if we are to accept these policy rationales as incontrovertible truths, there is no justification for the incredible specificity with which the code’s rules are drafted. Most first-year criminal law students resort to charts and graphs to wade through the code’s provisions – 1st deg. murder = premeditation, manslaughter = provocation/ regular recklessness, and so on. While it makes intuitive sense to punish a premeditated murder more than one committed in the heat of passion, the criminal code goes one step further by outlining formalistic rules around matters best left to common sense.

Under the MPC’s version of attempt liability, for example, a person must act with purpose to cause a result, but need only act with the mens rea of the actual offense for attendant circumstances. Therefore, an actor who recklessly shoots into a crowd of people cannot be charged with attempted murder, yet a man who recklessly assumes a woman is consenting to sex is guilty of attempted rape. What accounts for these sliver-thin distinctions? Can we really say that an actor who recklessly attempts murder is less deserving of punishment than one who recklessly attempts rape? Acquitting the former and charging the latter merely because ‘the rules say so’ will not lead to sound judgments, and only gives jurors and judges an excuse to skirt their responsibilities as decision-makers.

Giving in to our Fears

Despite the criminal code’s many flaws, it is not difficult to understand why we continue to teach and glorify it in case books and court opinions. The legitimacy of the system, perhaps, rests on the belief that the law is fair and consistent. Putting our faith in the criminal code maintains the illusion that verdicts are based not on the whim and fancy of a particular judge but on the basis of pre-arranged rules.

The reality, however, is that judges and juries must still make hard judgments about whether or not people should go to jail, relying as much on their intuition and sympathies as they do the facts of a given case. The criminal code cannot possibly systematize that process. For all our fears about jury discretion and abuse, upholding the code as the ‘face’ of our law only conceals the subjectivity of the entire process and immunizes decisions from thoughtful critique. Moreover, judges may be tempted to rigidly apply doctrine, abdicating their ethical responsibility to consider each trial on the merits. Eliminating the code, I believe, will empower juries and only lead to more honest and transparent decision-making.

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