Lawyer puts the cart before the horse
19/07/2020 Category: poor-reasoning
The purpose of making an argument is to advance a conclusion. It could be an opinion, a suggestion or an observation which somebody believes can help to improve the human life experience.
The majority of arguments we are exposed to in daily life are merely opinions. Those are many and varied. However, nearly all of them have one thing in common - they contain some sort of a payoff of to the maker. This could be financial or material gain, or simply a wish to see the world follow a particular path. Whatever the motive, the payoff is always there.
An article on the Australian Broadcasting Commission website featured a crime survivor expressing an opinion that rapist-murderers should be jailed for life. A lawyer expressed an opposite opinion. He stated "Life sentence without parole is unconscionable in any legal system, irrespective of the offence, because one of the purposes of sentencing is rehabilitation."
That's a non-sequitur - it simply doesn't follow. This falls into the class of what Aristotle called 'begging the question', or circular reasoning. In this instance the lawyer's argument begs to be conceded the notion that lifetime imprisonment is unacceptable despite that point not being proven by the mere existence of rehabilitation. It's a matter of preference. Hence, we can wonder whether the lawyer made a clumsy statement or was advancing a notion convenient to his own profession.
A decision may be made that one of the purposes of sentencing ought to be rehabilitation. That may or may not be due to a consideration that life sentences without parole are unconscionable. Instead, it might be decided on the strength of financial cost and political risk to governments. Leaders may advance an insistence on rehabilitation due to humanitarian concerns despite that not being their true motive.
The simple reality is that the two concepts are mutually exclusive. You must choose one but you can't have both. Your choice could apply to all prisoners, or each individual case could be decided upon its own merits. The lawyer's statement suggests that such choices are inappropriate, arguing as if a pre-existing blanket evaluation is set in stone. However, it isn't.
On what do you base such a decision? Which of the two is the most unconscionable? In whose opinion? The reality is that there are many factors involved in such a choice. One is that prisoners often hail from dysfunctional and/or unsavoury backgrounds and can be viewed as victims themselves. Therefore they might deserve a second chance. Another is that releasing prisoners back into the community has a failure rate such that making the one life less miserable can result in others being murdered, raped or otherwise have their lives ruined in a humanistic experiment gone horribly wrong.
These are obvious factors. Less obvious is the consideration that imprisonment for life is economically expensive and sometimes politically hazardous for governments. Leaders can be directly accused of cruelty for keeping prisoners in jail today, but it's harder to hold them directly responsible for released prisoners reoffending tomorrow. They can and do deflect the blame for that onto parole boards.
These issues are a matter for discussion and evaluation. Whatever the decision, the choice of rehabilitation in no way proves by itself that life imprisonment without parole is unconscionable.
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