Justice, In This Instance

This morning, the President-Elect told George Stephanopolos that he was "leaving the door open" on the possibility of investigating the Bush administration for "potential crimes." Here's the full story.

The implications stemming from such an investigation deserve careful, public consideration.

On the one hand, we have the obvious list of potentially criminal things the Bush administration did, repeated so frequently even in this blog that I will not subject you to a printed retelling of it, allowing you to stop the list in your head when it has reached sufficient size to make the point.

On the other hand, in jobs where almost any mistake you make probably violates a law, this sort of after-the-fact prosecution is precisely why Dick Cheney is trying to withhold his records. That and he's a sneaky git, but this is a credible reason. The term "corrupt politician" can sometimes seem like a redundancy, and in general individuals who break the law while holding office should be held accountable for their actions. But the last eight years have seen a systematic, methodical effort to undermine the structure of the US government carried on not just at the highest levels, but across large areas of entire departments. Prosecuting the handful of individuals who might eventually be held to account for this seems inadequate to the scale of what has occurred.

In a nation ruled by laws, no person or office should be allowed to rise above them, but shouldn't our effort be focused on mapping out the degree to which Bush et al have violated the public trust, and then trying to ensure that their legion transgressions can't be repeated? I for one would take no solace in seeing an Alberto Gonzalez behind bars. I would be greatly heartened to learn that an oversight mechanism that would actually do its job had been created to keep someone else in his position from filling the justice department with lawyers who had passed an ideological litmus test. The President Elect is probably correct when he says, "We must avoid any temptation simply to move on." But we must equally avoid any temptation simply to punish for the sake of vengeance. I believe that justice, in this instance, is better served by the pursuit of improved government in the future than by an exact accounting for past crimes.

Bullying 2.0

A jury in Los Angeles has convicted a woman for accessing information on a website in violation of its terms of service. She was convicted of three misdemeanor charges, reduced by the jury from felonies. The woman convicted, Lori Drew, was charged because she created a MySpace account and used it to convince her daughter’s nemesis, Megan Meier, that a made up boy liked her. When Drew sent Megan a message that said, “The world would be a better place without you,” Megan hung herself.

Other than the substantial “ick” factor of the whole sordid affair, the prosecution claims Drew “violated federal laws that prohibit gaining access to a computer without authorization.” I’m not convinced that this actually is applicable to what happened here. The whole thing underlines the fact that technologies have been moving faster than the laws that should govern them. What Drew did is certainly wrong, in a moral sense, but I don’t know that it violates any specific law, let alone the one she was charged with:

Legal and computer fraud experts said the application of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, passed in 1986 and amended several times, appeared to be expanding with technology and the growth of social networking on the Internet. More typically, prosecutions under the act have involved people who hack into computer systems.

I’m not a lawyer, and Drew’s defense would seem to rest on a kind of backseat, “I’m not touching you,” finger a centimeter away kind of argument. Instead of trying to shoehorn people into violating laws that don’t really apply, we need to work on sensible laws for crimes as they arise. Besides, I can’t imagine that the Drew family’s trips to the supermarket are a whole lot of fun just at the moment. The whole thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, both of prosecutorial overreach and grandstanding, and of … well, I don’t know exactly what you’d call what Lori Drew did. “Shameful” and “disturbing” don’t quite do it justice.