Thumbs Down On Cyber Democracy
Call it Dittohead Justice.
During the penalty phase of the Susan Smith trial, America Online asked subscribers if she should get the death penalty or life in prison for killing her two little boys.
A whopping 96 percent said she should die. Of course, only 77 people responded, a fact which wasn’t reported as widely as the percentage. When Princeton Survey Research Associates conducted a statistically valid poll on the question, only 63 percent voted for the chair.
But that’s still a sizable majority, and a far cry from the decision of the jury, which took 2-1/2 hours to decide unanimously on life.
The difference is that no one participating in the America Online survey or the Princeton poll was required to know anything or read anything, or listen or talk about the trial before giving an opinion.
The same principle drives some radio call-in shows: Hit a few buttons and sound off. Speak from the gut, and don’t allow sober reflection to get in the way. Like those who call Rush and G. Gordon, the AOL respondents were self-selected - the sample consisted entirely of people who had an impulse to sound off.
Of course, they didn’t get to sound off in any detail; it was thumbs up or thumbs down. But AOL subscribers had the opportunity to elaborate in an electronic message folder in the ABC News section of the service. The folder quickly filled up; a second one had 288 messages at last count. Some of the messages on both sides were thoughtful. This seemed more typical: “guilty as sin should die in the lake strapped in the car and let it sink very slowly she is crazy like a fox its a good excuse but not one I’ll buy”
Dittoheads are impatient. Letting the killer sit in a cell and dwell on her crime is too subtle a punishment for them. Get it over with, take action, and make it final and irrevocable.
I am using “dittoheads” in a generic sense here. I’m referring to anyone who is in a spout-off mode, who fails to take time to reflect upon evidence that argues against initial impulses. In this sense, all of us are dittoheads sometimes. We get fed up, and we want the offending thing or person removed from our lives: Fry her! Bomb them into the Stone Age! Crucify him!
That was true of the people of Union, whose hatred of Susan Smith knew no bounds when they first learned that she had killed the children they had frantically searched for. But then they learned more, and took time to think. And those who were chosen as jurors went further.
They heard, not about excuses, but about the mitigating circumstances which caused a woman who was a wreck of a human being on many levels to be in an abnormal state of mind on the night of the murders.
Those circumstances in no way altered the horrible nature of what she did. The jurors empathized with David Smith in his grief as well as with Beverly Russell, the guilt-wracked stepfather who claimed a portion of the blame. They stared unblinkingly at the gruesome evidence of the little boys’ suffering in their last moments.
They saw and heard it all, they took it in soberly, and they deliberated. Their verdict was sound on any level, legal or moral. In the end, no juror could accept defense lawyer David Bruck’s invitation to “cast the first stone.”
Stone-throwing is easy for poll respondents. But it is my belief that there is no fundamental difference between them and the Smith jurors. However vengeful our initial impulses, when confronted with all of the evidence, and required to sit down and soberly deliberate, most of us would do what the jury did.
Calm deliberation based on full access to the facts beats gut reaction almost every time.
There’s a lot of talk these days about how technology is making our form of government obsolete. Representative democracy was fine for the 18th century, but not for the age of the information superhighway. We’ll sit at our interactive home entertainment systems and pick our movies, plane tickets and groceries - why not our laws as well?
Neopopulists say we no longer need city councils, legislatures or Congress to make critical decisions about taxes, or Bosnia. We can be our own representatives.
But we can’t, not because “the people” lack wisdom but because we lack the time. With jobs and families and the other activities that constantly make it harder to find time to sleep, only the people who have been duly delegated by the rest of us have the luxury to study issues and deliberate to the extent that they can make decisions of the quality of that reached by the Smith jury.
When we make judgments from our living rooms (or editorial offices), and express them at a distance, we do so in a vacuum. Inconvenient facts can be ignored; competing interests need not be balanced.
That’s why we need deliberative bodies, to give us something better than dittohead justice. Or dittohead democracy.
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