Beyond the Pale

In Czarist Russia the pale was the region where Jews were legally allowed to live. If a hapless Jew were found outside it he was in serious trouble, subject to whatever abuse his discoverer might decide to inflict. Not that life inside the pale was all that secure. The pograms that drove Tevye and his family from their home in Fiddler on the Roof were common occurrences throughout Eastern Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nor were Jews the only people who often found themselves with few legal rights. Peter I (the Great, a title he effectively bestowed on himself) changed the status of Russian serfs so that they were tied not to the land but to the landlord. In effect he made them slaves who could be and often were bought and sold, though technically only as family units. In turn the lords were taxed on the number of “souls” they possessed. Tax cheaters were placed outside the law and like the Jew outside the pale could be robbed or killed with impunity.

American law has progressed so that even those accused of the most serious crimes are afforded legal protections including the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, at least in theory. There seems to be a growing class of offenses where the punishment is more in the spirit of Peter the Great, in particular sex offenses. The modern Jew, I mean sex offender, is restricted to where he can live too. Unlike the Jew of old he is not required to wear identifying clothing but is required to register, today’s equivalent of the scarlet letter. It is often not the pervert of our imagination who is caught in that web but the unfortunate teenager who got his under age girlfriend pregnant and then finds himself branded for life (along with the girlfriend and child if they marry.)

Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst cruised to reelection on a platform calling for harsher penalties for child molesters, a minimum 25 year sentence for a first offence and the death penalty for repeaters, defining a child as anyone under age 14. He doesn’t say what he would do when the molester is also under age, nor does he allow for degrees of abuse, at least not in his stump speech. Presumably fondling or inappropriate touching would qualify since I should think anything beyond that would already constitute rape under existing laws. He also doesn’t say what should happen in a case involving an under cover police agent where the culprit merely thought his intended victim was a child, or to the congressman whose offense is restricted to sending lascivious instant messages to the objects of his perverted desires.

Could we all just take a deep breath? We are disturbingly close to returning to a society where guilt does not even have to be proved, particularly in sex crimes involving children. Sometimes there doesn’t have to be a crime. We have police departments cooperating with TV scandal programs to film and expose men soliciting phony prostitutes, or being lured into set up liaisons with supposed adolescents. We have prosecutors coaxing day care children into concocting the most bizarre stories, convincing shocked jurors that the stories are true, and then sending innocent men and women to prison. Reputations, careers, and even lives (sometimes literally) are being destroyed on the flimsiest evidence, maybe even without trial.

There are reasons for our constitutional rights. Someday we might find ourselves on the wrong side of an unfair accusation. I think it’s time we calmed down and remembered that.