In his last days in office, Joe Biden commuted the capital sentences of 37 people on death row. It was an admirable act of mercy (though one that regrettably stopped short of halting all scheduled federal executions).
Trump of course hated this decision. But when the president commutes your sentence for a federal crime, that's pretty much a done deal. Even Trump's team of lawless goons haven't found a way around it yet.
And so—the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday—having failed to undo Biden's final act of humanity— the administration has decided to try to make the lives of these federal prisoners as hellish as possible so long as they remain in government custody.
According to the WSJ report, Trump's creeps in the Justice Department have made a point of transferring these 37 people to the worst conditions in the federal prison system—supermax facilities where they are held in solitary confinement for as many as 23 hours a day, with only a slit-like window onto the outside world.
There is no security justification for moving these 37 people—many of whose crimes are decades-old at this point—into maximum-security facilities. The sole purpose is to retaliate against them for being the involuntary beneficiaries of a humane act on the part of Trump's Democratic predecessor.
This has to violate the Constitution in some way or other; though I don't know exactly what clause. Surely it's a due process or equal protection or eighth amendment problem to deliberately confine people in worse conditions out of pure personal and political animus.
But until the prisoners can litigate their cases through to victory—if they ever can—Trump as executive head of the federal Bureau of Prisons can make their lives hell. And he is seemingly doing all in his power to do so.
It's a perfect opportunity for Trump to exercise both his fervid sadistic imagination—and his boundless capacity for psychological "projection."
On the sadism side: the Journal describes how Trump officials have gone out of their way to paint conditions in these facilities as gruesomely as possible—and then to boast that they wish they could make them even worse.
One of Trump's DOJ appointees reportedly regretted that inmates in these supermax prisons have even so much as "windows to see daylight"). (The Journal includes a picture of one of these cells—and it's not much daylight, I can tell you.)
It appears the Trump administration wishes it could throw people into lightless medieval dungeons like something out of the Prisoner of Chillon.
Meanwhile—as I wrote about in an earlier post—Pam Bondi and the rest of Trump's minions have also sought to pressure state officials to bring capital charges at the non-federal level against these same inmates—for the same crimes (thanks to our dear Supreme Court, the Constitution's seemingly self-explanatory prohibition against double jeopardy has been interpreted not to preclude dual prosecutions for the same offense so long as they are carried out by different "sovereigns").
The utterly relentless vindictiveness of this proposal (these are people, after all, who are already serving life sentences in federal facilities—they cannot pose a threat to anyone in the community) boggles the mind.
Back when I first saw this story in February—as I wrote at the time—I could only think of Robert Burns's phrase "legal rage."
Think on the dungeon's grim confine,
Where Guilt and poor Misfortune pine!
Guilt, erring man, relenting view,
But shall thy legal rage pursue
The wretch, already crushed low
By cruel Fortune's undeserved blow?
Then there's the aspect of projection here. Trump, by my count, has ordered the extrajudicial killing of 21 people by drone in just the last few weeks. He qualifies as a serial murderer at this point. His body count is higher than any of the people on federal death row. If anyone should be pleading for clemency for murderers, it's him.
But no; Trump understands that one can always escape the psychic weight of guilt by externalizing it onto a scapegoat, and venting one's cruelty and scorn upon that hapless individual.
And so, Trump has gone on record as wishing literally infinite torment on the people whose sentences Biden commuted. He reportedly wrote on Christmas day last year: "I refuse to wish a Merry Christmas to those lucky ‘souls’ but, instead, will say, GO TO HELL!"
So much for peace on earth and good will to men.
It has often struck me, alas, that we shouldn't perhaps be surprised by the infinite vindictiveness of our criminal legal system—since so many Americans (including, it appears, our president) subscribe to a version of the Christian religion that worships an infinitely vindictive God: a "loving Father in Heaven" who earmarks "ninety per cent of their contemporaries [...] for an eternal super-Auschwitz," as Arthur Koestler once put it.
No wonder that many a Christian has not found in Jesus's admonitions to love one's enemies a reason to oppose caging people in dark dungeons for twenty-three hours a day. After all—they kneel each Sunday before a God in Heaven who—according to their belief—will inflict literally an infinitely worse penalty on the vast majority of humankind. So why should they care about merely finite and time-limited torments that the state inflicts on people in this life?
As Saint Augustine once put it—in defending the persecution of heretical sects (as quoted by the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, in his Reflections on History): "What injustice can there be in punishing for their sins, by order of the government, those whom God warns by this present judgment and chastisement to flee eternal fire?"
So much for turning the other cheek.
But suppose this version of Christianity—the infinitely vindictive one—is not the only possible one.
Oh, I know it is a sin even to contemplate it; "I know one may be damned / For hoping no one else may e'er be so," as Byron once put it.
But entertain the thought for a moment. What if the infinitely vindictive version of the Christian God—that Trump and so many evangelical conservatives appear to believe in—is a kind of libel upon that God.
As Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote (in his satirical poem "Peter Bell the Third"):
Tis a lie to say, "God damns!"
Where was Heaven's Attorney General
When they first gave out such flams?
It is only human cruelty that damns—human sadism of the sort the Trump administration is now venting on defenseless federal prisoners who have no way to fight back. Sadism of the sort that invents imaginary torments in the next world, and then ascribes this infinite atrocity to a supposedly all-merciful God. (Sadism of the sort that seeks to "realize in this world the imaginary hell of the other," as Volney once put it (Eckler trans.))
Churchmen damn themselves to see, Shelley continued,
God's sweet love in burning coals.
And then there's the rest of us—who don't believe there is anything to be gained for victims or society in trying to kill those who have killed; to heap up even more corpses in history's charnel house. Those who believe that the world is hellish enough already without inventing imaginary hells or deliberately trying to construct a hell on earth in which to confine our fellow mortals.
Shelley wrote:
And some few, like we know who,
Damned — but God alone knows why —
To believe their minds are given
To make this ugly Hell a Heaven;
In which faith they live and die.
No comments:
Post a Comment