In my last entry, I wrote about how the fiancée of Philip Markoff (left), the accused "Craiglist Killer," reacted to the arrest of her one-time future husband. She had a difficult time believing that her loved one could be capable of such actions, even unveiling the ole' "he wouldn't hurt a fly" response. Her reaction strikes me as quite understandable–most of us would struggle to comprehend the criminal (or even just problematic) behavior of people in our own lives. Our expectations and assumptions about human nature are regularly challenged by the reality of actual behavior, as demonstrated by this article in today's Associated Press with the headline "From church-going family man to bank robber?"
The article opens as follows:
Bruce Windsor lived the life of a respectable family man – father of four, deacon in his South Carolina church, youth soccer coach, a volunteer who helped build orphanages in Brazil. Then four days after his 43rd birthday, authorities say, he donned a mask, wig and sunglasses and tried to rob a bank at gunpoint.
Both as individuals and as a society, we have trouble with stories like these, don't we? They don't fit into the tidy, predictable categories we like to use for simplifying the world around us. We hear "family man," "soccer coach," and "church deacon" and we think we have a pretty good handle on the type of man we're talking about. Just as Markoff's background as an upper-middle class medical student played a major role in the heightened media attention to his arrest, so, too, is the surprising background of the ex-deacon the only reason his story has been deemed attention-worthy–how many other bank robberies in the past month have merited write-ups of this length?
The AP article focuses on the role that the economic downturn may have played in this suspect's alleged transformation to a life of crime. Faced with irrefutable evidence of his guilt–after all, the suspect (left) was trapped in the bank by police for 90 minutes before surrendering to the SWAT team–his sister bypassed the "can't hurt a fly" routine and went straight to the following explanation: "This is something Bruce has never done. The only thing I can think of is he must've just snapped under the pressure... I can't imagine the desperation that must have caused this."
Given the state of the economy, we may be hearing this type of explanation for criminal behavior more often in the years to come. It'll be interesting to see how these types of defenses/excuses are received–by jurors, judges, as well as the general public. Because they sound suspiciously similar to me to the types of explanations at which we often turn up our noses in other contexts. Like "youth in this neighborhood turned to the drug trade because there just weren't adequate employment and educational opportunities for members of this community."
There is empirical evidence that we view mitigating information differently depending on the individual in question. Researchers Craig Haney, Laura Sweeney, and Mona Lynch have conducted a series of mock jury experiments examining the decision-making of jurors in capital murder trials. Such cases provide an excellent means of assessing how people respond to explanations for criminal behavior, as jurors in these trials are charged with the responsibility of weighing mitigating and aggravating factors during the penalty phase of their deliberations.
What we learn from these studies is that people do, indeed, see excuses for bad behavior differently depending on the actor in question. More specifically, White mock jurors rated aggravating factors–those aspects of the case that made the crime in question more deserving of punishment, such as its heinousness and a defendant's lack of remorse–as more important when a murder defendant was Black as opposed to White. On the other hand, they saw mitigators–those aspects of a case that might push a jury towards leniency, such as a defendant's youth or past experiences as a victim of abuse–as less persuasive for Black versus White defendants.
This relative inability to empathize with defendants of different backgrounds likely contributes to the well-documented findings that in real cases, Black defendants convicted of murdering White victims are significantly more likely to receive a death sentence than are other defendants–particularly when with an all-White jury.
So there are consequences to our propensity for seeing people in terms of stable, predictable personality types. It's a tendency that leaves us more surprised when "certain types of people" commit criminal acts or other forms of malfeasance. It renders us more amenable in some cases versus others to the possibility that the individual is a "good person" who "just made one mistake." In short, we're quicker to give the benefit of the doubt to some transgressors than others.
In the case of the ex-deacon bank-robber, consider this quote from the alleged culprit's pastor: "We all make mistakes, some more costly than others. But one bad decision doesn't change who somebody is." Sounds a bit like a campaign slogan for a gubernatorial election in Illinois, no? But we should all be so lucky to have people in our lives to stand by us like this, not to mention media sources willing to trumpet such support and fellow citizens who might be swayed by it.
However, it would seem that we're more receptive to such efforts at mitigation in certain cases and for certain perpetrators. In other circumstances, it's easier to dismiss arguments like these as nothing more than flimsy excuses.
