On MBS, Justice and Punishment
Terry H. Schwadron
Mar. 1, 2021
Somewhere between the decision to forgo any effective punishment to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for international murder and seeing the work to rehab the image of Donald Trump for ordering an attack on his own government, I hear alarm bells going off about the nature of justice and punishment.
It’s not just about how we carry out prosecution and punishment, it seems to be about whether we care about that sort of justice altogether. Just the week, we saw a raft of punishment-related issues that should have us scratching our collective heads.
— New Jersey moved to legalize marijuana use for adults using weed recreationally, joining 11 other jurisdictions, but in most, the recent trend of states and territories legalizing cannabis in some form or another, there remains a large population of individuals who have a criminal record for cannabis possession. There is a basic fairness question here.
— Illinois became the first state to recognize that cash bail laws are actual punishment by jailing those arrested who have not gone to trial, but who are too poor to come up with cash payments. Illinois just eliminating the practice as in a bill that addressed a number of policing and imprisonment practices, and drew derision from police unions, despite no finding of guilt.
— In his confirmation hearings, Atty. Gen.-designate Merrick Garland vowed to address racial inequities in imprisonment, unequal enforcement of drug and other non-violent crime laws, to revisit the return of the death penalty in the Trump administration and open avenues to explore restorative justice approaches. Groups are aligning to hold him to the hard work of making the promises true.
— And, of course, there’s a lot more concern about running more than 250 insurgent rioters at the U.S. Capitol to criminal ground than there seems to be in work to connect the coordinating dots all the way back to Donald Trump’s obsessive election fraud campaign. Republican defenders were going out of their way again this week to shield Trump from personal connection to the insurrection. Even so, we’re making a public platform for Trump to consider running again and a vast campaign to suppress votes against Trumpism.
In short, it’s impossible not to notice a sudden rush of issues that, together, raise questions about what we as a society actually seek to achieve through punishment.
What We Know
In the case of Saudi’s MBS, as he is known, we have what is reported as a detailed American intelligence finding that he directly approved the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi dissident. Washington Post columnist and American resident who was drugged and dismembered in a Saudi embassy in Turkey in 2018.
Apparently, after weeks of debate with his national security team, Joe Biden concluded that there was no effective punishment for MBS, including a bar against entering the United States, seizing fortunes or setting off American criminal charges against him. To do so would breach the necessary diplomatic ties with an ally.
For two years, Donald Trump just refused to acknowledge that U.S. intelligence had reached the conclusion that MBS directed the murder — and now son-in-law Jared Kushner wants to work privately with MBS in international investments.
After the delay, we have arrived at a shared, public denouncement of the crown prince’s behavior — as required by a previous Congressional vote. More than 70 security folks who carried it out have been sanctioned, and, for policy reasons already underway, we’re going to forgo some weapons deals with the Saudi kingdom. That’s pretty much it. I doubt that even an international civil suit would prove successful against the royal, since what we really have here is informed speculation by the CIA and not direct evidence that would necessarily hold up in a criminal or civil court.
What here are we supposed to conclude about the nature of punishment? Usually, we say that in the name of public safety, we need to act to take the bad guy off the streets and that we want our civilized society to act to right wrongs done whoever is perceived as a victim.
Simply, this non-punishment for MBS is neither. No victim is avenged here, and, with the repressive policies that Saudi Arabia pursues, we can count on the fact that MBS will not be restrained from doing it again, just perhaps not to an American journalist in such a horrible way. How about we stop talking about financial sanctions and just take the CIA material to a grand jury, indict MBS, and if he steps foot in the U.S., arrest him for trial.
It’s hard to conclude anything other than MBS just got away with murder.
Applying the Theory
I’m trying to square all this with how we look at our own long record of unequal punishment.
As a society, we just passed again this week on prosecuting a New York police officer for what looks like a very wrongful death of a young Black man who was walking home from the corner store in Rochester, NY. Despite efforts to focus special prosecution teams, this was a decision that The New York Times showed us is part of a pattern among 43 investigations that the New York attorney general into police killings over five years, in which none led to a conviction and three have led to charges. Are we caring about the victim here? Are we getting bad guys off the street, even if they are cops?
Despite the Capitol insurrection, Republicans want us to look only at those breaking into the Capitol without investigating what prompted the riot. As a Republican vote against conviction in an impeachment trial and Donald Trump’s reemergence to a cheering CPAC audience of political conservatives shows, we’re actually inviting more of the same. Aren’t American voters somehow a victim here who need to exact punishment for abridging our basic rules?
Haven’t we been debating for years not the racial and class disproportionalities of imprisonment in our society? Didn’t we just spend an entire presidential cycle pitting the perceptions of maintaining what was presented as Law& Order against the concerns of racial justice?
It seems that we don’t believe our own rhetoric: When it is politically convenient, the purpose of punishment is something altogether different than what we expect from a country that promotes equal justice under the law.
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