Ethics in Criminal justice

On Christmas Eve 1968, Robert Anthony Williams sexually assaulted and murdered a ten-year-old girl in the bathroom of a YMCA in Des Moines, Iowa. Having wrapped her body in a blanket and placed it in his car, he fled from the scene and disposed of the body in the wilderness. Two days later, Williams contacted an attorney in Davenport, Iowa, indicating his desire to surrender to law enforce- ment. As part of an agreement reached between his attorney and the Davenport police, the officers who would transport him from Davenport back to Des Moines were not to question him. Williams had indicated he would provide details of the offense once in the presence of his attorney in Des Moines. During the subsequent transport, however, one of the police officers accompanying him gave Williams what has come to be known as the “Christian Burial Speech.” Knowing that Williams was a deeply religious man with a history of serious mental illness, the officer (addressing Williams as “Reverend”) stated:

I want to give you something to think about while we’re traveling down the road . . . They are predicting several inches of snow for tonight, and I feel that you yourself are the only person that knows where this little girl’s body is, that you yourself have only been there once, and if you get a snow on top of it you yourself may be unable to find it . . . the parents of this little girl should be entitled to a Christian burial for the little girl who was snatched away from them on Christmas [E]ve and murdered.1

Following the speech, Williams led the officers to the young girl’s body. He was later tried and convicted of murder—a verdict which was upheld on appeal, despite claims that the evidence uncovered during the trip from Davenport to Des Moines should not have been admitted.

Although this case raises important legal questions concerning the admissibility of evidence and Sixth Amendment right to counsel, it also provokes crucial ethical questions about police interrogations, agreements and contracts, and the desirability of employing questionable means to achieve a desired (and desirable) end:

• Was the officer’s appeal to Williams’ conscience simply a case of good police work? • Does it matter that Williams was mentally ill and easily manipulated?

Ethics, Crime, and Criminal Justice, Second Edition, by Christopher R. Williams and Bruce A. Arrigo. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright © 2012 by Pearson Education, Inc.

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Chapter 8 • Means and Ends: The Importance of Consequences 145

• Does it matter that the officer violated an agreement or promise not to question Williams during the automobile ride?

• Does it make a difference that the behavior of the officer ultimately led to success in finding the girl’s body and, thus, critical evidence?

To answer questions such as these, we need a means of identifying what is ultimately important, and how what we regard as important applies in principle to particular instances. As discussed in Chapter 2, we need to know what we value, and how decisions and actions pro- mote or fail to promote what we regard as valuable. Is there some sense in which finding the young girl’s body should be prioritized over procedural rules? Does our respect for individual rights take priority over what we regard as the best interests of the victim’s family and the community?

When we introduced the ethical importance of good decision-making in Chapter 2, we noted that our decisions and beliefs should be informed by good reasons, and having good reasons is often a matter of identifying and prioritizing key moral values and principles and the ways in which they apply to the issue or situation in question. We also noted that the subfield of ethics known as normative ethics consists of theories or frameworks that attempt to identify and prioritize moral values and, in so doing, provide guidelines for moral decision-making. Different ethical frameworks, however, prioritize different values, thus promoting different principles and pulling us toward different conclusions about moral issues and dilemmas: consequentialist theories focus on the consequences that our decisions or actions bring about; deontological theories focus on conforming our decisions and actions to relevant moral duties and obligations; and virtue ethics encourages us to develop good moral character, seeking to embody virtue while avoiding vice.

Given the importance and usefulness of these three basic ethical frameworks, we explore each of them in greater detail over the next three chapters. We begin in the present chapter with an examination of consequentialist theories—those that have us ask, “What will happen of I do X?” “Who will be affected and how?” and “How might other alternatives produce different outcomes?”

CONSEQUENTIALISM

According to consequentialism, actions are “right” so far as they have beneficial consequences. Thus, actions, laws, policies, etc., are morally right to the degree—and only to the degree—that they produce some good or some useful outcome.2 Actions themselves are neither inherently right nor inherently wrong; rather, moral worth attaches only to what decisions and actions bring about, not directly to the decisions or actions themselves. Some consequentialists, for example, would argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with an act of torture; instead, the moral permissibility of torture should be judged only by the good that it yields (or is expected to yield) relative to all other possible courses of action. In other words, the “means” can be justified by the “end.”

For a particular decision or action to be morally appropriate, then, it must on balance generate better consequences than all other available courses of action. If all available options produce both good and bad consequences, then the morally preferred one is the action that yields more overall good than harm.3 The desirability and permissibility of pretrial release policy, plea bargaining, determinate sentencing, capital punishment, and many other issues and dilemmas within criminal justice can be determined using the basic orientation of consequentialism: if, relative to other reasonable options, the overall benefits of the policy or practice outweigh the overall harm, then it is a “good” policy or practice.

Ethics, Crime, and Criminal Justice, Second Edition, by Christopher R. Williams and Bruce A. Arrigo. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright © 2012 by Pearson Education, Inc.

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146 Part 3 • Normative Ethics: Theory and Application

While seemingly straightforward and intuitively appealing, several critical questions need to be addressed with respect to the logic and implications of consequentialist moral theory, each of which will be explored over the remainder of the chapter:

• What constitutes a “good” or desirable outcome? • For whom should the outcome be beneficial? • Should we focus on actual consequences? Expected consequences? Intended consequences? • Are consequences really the only thing that matters morally?

GOOD AND DESIRABLE CONSEQUENCES

What if we could substantially decrease the overall amount of physical pain in the world by giving everyone a “universal” vaccination which guards against almost all illnesses and diseases, but has the inescapable side effect of dulling emotions and permanently limiting our experience of joy? Would we willingly give up our experiences of joy for the sake of remaining in good health? What if we could completely eradicate crime in society, but doing so would require each of us to live under constant surveillance? Would we be willing to give up our experience of privacy and freedom for the sake of living without fear of criminal victimization?

To answer either of these questions, of course, we need to know whether we place greater value on health or on joyful emotions, on privacy and freedom or protection from criminal harm. If morality requires that we bring about good consequences through action or policy, we need to first know what things are good—in other words, what we value most. In and of itself, the idea that we should act so as to produce the best overall consequences does not answer this question for us. We need an additional “theory” of the good. We need to determine what matters.

By far the most widely discussed and influential variation of consequentialism is utilitarianism. Originally outlined by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), utilitarianism argues that actions are morally right so far as they maximize good consequences and/or minimize bad consequences; more specifically, however, classical utilitari- anism understands only one thing to be ultimately “good” or valuable—happiness. Every human being desires happiness, and each of us understands happiness to be the greatest possible kind of good. In John Stuart Mill’s words, “The utilitarian doctrine is that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being desirable as means to that end.”4 In other words, wealth, status, food, love, knowledge, and many other things commonly understood as “goods” can only be understood as such because they are means by which we attain the more primary end of happiness.

Mill’s quote employs the distinction we made in Chapter 2 between values and goods that are intrinsic, and those that are instrumental. Recall that intrinsic goods are those things that are good in and of themselves or for their own sake; instrumental goods are those things that help us attain intrinsic goods. Thus, money is generally understood to be an instrumental good because its value lies in its ability to help us attain other things that are intrinsically good—by itself, money is of limited worth or utility. Happiness, however, is not a means to anything—we do not use it to get other things that are desirable. Instead, we desire happiness because the state of being happy is, by itself, something we consider to be good. Knowing that happiness is the highest of goods, we are in a better position to determine what constitutes good consequences, as well as what kinds of decisions and actions are morally permissible and desirable.

Whereas happiness is intrinsically valuable, honesty, legal rights, and other moral values and principles must be thought of as valuable only instrumentally—only to the extent that they aid in

Ethics, Crime, and Criminal Justice, Second Edition, by Christopher R. Williams and Bruce A. Arrigo. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright © 2012 by Pearson Education, Inc.