Earlier today, we covered some basic morality as it relates to taking actions and living with outcomes.
Even without mens rea or "criminal intent" (literally "guilty mind"), an actus reus "guilty act" can occur, becoming an act of "strict liability", for which the only legal defense is the exercise of "Due Diligence". In practical terms, this means that if you took every possible effort to prevent the occurrence of the "guilty act", can you defend against charges of, for example, "negligence".
A good example might be that you set the parking brake on your vehicle and couldn't reasonably expect the brakes to be defective and let the car roll down the hill and crush someone.
Please note the emphasis on "reasonably" -- and note that the blame is simply shifted from the driver of the car to the manufacturer (or installer) of the defective brakes. After all, if someone is harmed, someone's got to pay. Perhaps a bit more due-diligence should have been done on the part of the engineer who equipped the car with brakes. Perhaps there was a history of defective performance on that series of brakes? Or perhaps the engineer couldn't find any reporting of a history of defects... because of a cover-up.
Still, due diligence is an essential. People need to take reasonable precautions.
But, one has to ask, how does it affect a case if the due-diligence far exceeds anything reasonable? What happens when the supposed due-diligence itself comes to constitute "actus reus", and what happens when supposed good-intentions in pursuit of due-diligence come to constitute "mens rea"?
Imagine, if you will, that you are Thomas Hardman. You are taking a walk around the local park, where you have been getting your daily exercise since you were in high school and that park was the "lower field" for the athletics department.
As you walk out of the woods on the well-worn dirt trail, you continue walking the same course you've walked every day for years and years. As you approach a softball backstop, a couple and their tween-age child approach it the other direction. They are wearing team attire, and you are wearing jeans and a t-shirt, mostly because it's a beautiful sunny day in the mid-80s. You have been walking fairly briskly, mostly to get cardio benefit, and are sweating a bit.
Due diligence explains the mother of the tween-age girl not taking her eyes off of you for a second.
However, the adult male brandishing a baseball bat at you and yelling "WHAT?!" when you say "how ya doin'" is taking due-diligence nearly into the realm of mens rea if not actually following through with the actus reus by smacking you upside the head.
In some States, just brandishing the bat and yelling could constitute assault. In Maryland, if an officer didn't actually see them fracture your skull, it's not arrestable.
And you, Thomas Hardman, spend the rest of your walk wondering how people got to be so fucking crazy.
Imagine for a moment that you are Thomas Hardman -- really, it's not hard -- and you walk into a store and start looking for a comb. Combs do need to be replaced, now and then. Might as well get the paper, it's a Sunday after all, and a spare TV schedule magazine for the second TV is in order.
While looking for the comb, you hear an old man at the store talking loudly, and his voice rises to a roar: "yes, that guy. Keep your eye on him! Keep watching him! He's trouble, I tell you..." and the voice drops down below most audibility... and then he evidently gets his change, and walks out towards the door, and then stop and blushes deeply as he realizes you've been listening to him. Could he have been talking about you, Thomas Hardman? There's nobody else in the store except for the teens accompanying him, and the clerk, and you.
And you pay for your combs and paper, and wonder why the clerk is looking at you so strangely, and as you leave the store rubbing your neck, you wonder again how people got to be so fucking crazy...
And it occurs to you that possibly people are telling them things that make them fucking crazy. About you.
Okay, here's yet-another fascinating tidbit about Thomas Hardman. I like to drink. Probably it's unhealthy but generally speaking, me sitting in front of the television and swilling cheap beer isn't hurting anyone but me, and according to my physician, my liver's still good. Besides, drinking beer at home is keeping me off of the streets. Otherwise, I might be out drinking at a bar or something.
No doubt there are people out there -- lots of them -- to whom anyone who drinks is a slob and an alcoholic. And no doubt there are some such people who think that the only thing to do about alcoholics is to make them go to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous ("AA"). That might even be a good idea, unless perhaps that specific set of meetings is run by the Midtown Group, or "Group Q".
This group is widely alleged to be a Cult of Sexual Exploiters of Minors:
When Kristen was 17 and drinking out of control, her psychologist referred her to an Alcoholics Anonymous group that specialized in helping the youngest drinkers. In the Midtown Group, members and outsiders agree, young people could find new friends, constant fellowship, daily meetings, summer-long beach parties, and a charismatic leader who would steer them through sobriety.
But according to more than a dozen young people who structured their lives around the group, the unusual adaptation of AA that Michael Quinones created from his home in Bethesda became a confusing blend of comfort and crisis. They described a rigidly insular world of group homes and socializing, in which older men had sex with teenage girls, ties to family and friends were severed or strained, and the most vulnerable of alcoholics, some suffering from emotional problems, were encouraged to stop taking prescribed medications.
Kristen, now 26, said that for eight years, she was "passed along" from one middle-aged male leader of Midtown to another. She said her sponsor urged her to have sex with Quinones -- widely known as Mike Q. -- as a way to solidify her sobriety and spiritual revival. Kristen, who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used in keeping with AA traditions, also recalled helping to persuade other teenage girls to sleep with older men in the group.
"I pimped my sponsees out to sponsors," she said, referring to the AA members who agree to watch over a fellow member's sobriety. "I encouraged them to sleep with their sponsors because I really believed that this would help with their sobriety."
Rianne McNair, who left Midtown in 2005 after three years in the group, said, "Several of my friends had sex with Mike Q. One of my friends went to the beach house, and her sponsor assigned her to Mike Q.'s bedroom. The younger girls looked up to these guys; Mike is idolized, like, 'I got invited to Mike Q.'s house for dinner tonight. Can you believe it?' "
[ ... ] (Fisher, Marc, "Seeking Recovery, Finding Confusion", Washington Post, Page A01, July 22, 2007)
The thing about "alcoholics" is this: it's less that they drink, or that they drink a lot, it's more that drinking has taken control of their lives, driven them to the bottom rung of life, and very frequently ruined the lives of everyone around them. It's less about the alcohol, and more about the deterioration of personality. Fairly decent people can be transformed over time into petty and vengeful control freaks. According to "AA", it's possible to get of of alcohol, but it's a lot harder to get over being a petty and vengeful control freak.
Astute readers will probably observe that my remarks here may constitute being petty and vengeful, and that may even be true to some degree. But I'm not a control freak, at least not to the degree of picking people who drink and actively trying to ruin their lives so that they'll be driven into the loving arms of the control freaks at "AA". And I am definitely not the sort of control freak who uses court-ordered attendance at "AA" meetings to groom potential victims for a cult of pedophiles.
And, thank my Higher Power, I'm not out whispering around the local shopping centers against people who refuse to join the Cult.
Isn't there some sort of law against all of that?
Then why, pray tell, have so many young ladies fallen -- indeed, been ordered by courts, or advised by licensed professionals -- into the clutches of a cult of exploitative baby-boinkers?
The history of fiction -- as well as the history of law-enforcement agencies and the courts -- is rife with the concept of Cults masquerading as "normal people living normal lives". Indeed, it's one of the most prolific sub-genres, from H. P. Lovecraft's "Shadow over Innsmouth" through Ira Levin's "Stepford Wives".
In real life, of course, it's a bit beyond the pale to imagine that you move into a quiet little town and start settling in, and next thing you know, ten thousand secret Amish are all running around with pitchforks and crescent wrenches, flattening your tires and disassembling your power tools so that you will be living the good life just like them... a hundred miles from anywhere, and with no phone to call for rescue. "It's for your own good, you know," they would say. "It's what G_d wants, you know."
But is it beyond the pale to imagine that in quiet and long-settled suburbia, the children of the upper middle class have gotten into their parents' medicine-cabinet once too often and find themselves filching silverware so that they can score some heroin to take the edge off of their new Vicodin addiction? No, it's not beyond the pale. It happens all of the time. It's been happening for years.
It's been happening for so many years that there are people who graduated from high-school in the 1960s who had problems with addiction, and their kids graduating high-school in the 1980s had problems with addiction and their kids about to graduate in the late 2000s have problems with addiction. So it's not unreasonable to suppose that there are entire families -- or at least several members of several generations of families -- who are addicts or alcoholics in various stages of recovery, relapse, or denial.
One of the criticisms of AA is that over time, AA strips away elements of the member's own cultural identity and replaces it with a new and deviant cultural identity ( Levinson, D. (1983). Galanter, Marc. ed. "Current status of the field: An anthropological perspective on the behavior modification treatment of alcoholism". Recent Developments in Alcoholism (New York: Plenum Press) 1: 255–261. ISSN 0738-422X. PMID 6680227).
Now imagine this: multiple generations, all sharing a deviant cultural identity overlaid upon -- and masked by -- a more "normal and all-American" cultural identity could produce epic weirdness of a type that most people wouldn't notice if they were "just passing through". For people who grew up in it, it would seem normal since it would be the only thing they had ever known.
But for people who tried to settle down, well, look out buddy. Here come the Amish with pitchforks, but the words they're saying are more like something out of Genesis 19:5.
But first, someone in one generation will be selling dope to your kids, someone in another generation will arrest and remand them to court, and someone in another generation will be boinking your baby in a court-ordered Sex Cult.
But despite the difference in generations, they're all the same family... in the same little neighborhood "gone Innsmouth".
What next, Children of the Corn?
More to come?
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