Violence Defined, Justice Denied

Chandra Bozelko
Thu, 31 Jan 2019 18:21:29 -0800
Opinion

January's focus on the government shutdown shut out discussion of an important decision made by our Supreme Court in Stokeling v. United States.

The Stokeling decision deserves our attention because it shows how inconsistent and frivolous we are in defining violence.
Updated: Fri Feb 01, 2019

January's focus on the government shutdown shut out discussion of an important decision made by our Supreme Court in Stokeling v. United States.

The Stokeling decision deserves our attention because it shows how inconsistent and frivolous we are in defining violence.

In the Stokeling opinion, our highest court examined the requirements of the Armed Career Criminal Act. Specifically, a split Court held that Denard Stokeling's prior conviction for robbery when he "grabbed (the victim) by the neck and tried to remove her necklaces as she held onto them" was a violent offense under Florida law.

This was a reversal; the Florida Supreme Court had already decided multiple times that holding someone's neck and taking her jewelry wasn't violent if the victim didn't resist.

Common sense tells us — rather unanimously — that holding someone's neck and removing something she's wearing is a violent crime. But the fact that even esteemed judges opined that it wasn't didn't surprise me.

Six-plus years in prison put me in good position to see how inane our definitions of violence are. I know women who labeled as violent offenders because they handed a teller a note. Bank robbery is considered a violent crime no matter the circumstances.

I also lived with women who've shoplifted, led police on high speed chases away from the scenes of their crimes and then escaped when they finally landed in custody, pulling officers in more perilous pursuit. Because those crimes aren't ones of violence, the system claims those women are "nonviolent."

Our criminal codes are filled with contradictions like these. Threatening bodily harm is violent in some states, but not in others. To possess a gun illegally is a nonviolent crime, even though a gun's sole purpose is to do some violence. The federal government says that drug trafficking is an inherently violent crime even if a defendant convicted of it never touched anyone. It's almost like we don't know what violence is.

This lack of consistency invites people other than Supreme Court justices to get in on the violence-definition racket and deem other things violent, like presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren's claim of Native American heritage, online harassment and doxing, ableism (the discrimination against individuals with disabilities), wage theft and gaslighting. All have been called a form of violence because they aim to silence or eradicate people.

Using definitions of violence we're developing in public discourse, the government shutdown and the polar vortex would be violent, too.

I understand that defining events and phenomena as violent attracts needed scrutiny to their effects on human existence. I also think we've oversimplified — and therefore misunderstood — trauma if we maintain that an act requires physical force to be considered harmful.

But something doesn't have to be called violent to be really, really bad. That false expectation is what landed us here now, where anything that's bad is violent... except actual violence like grabbing someone's neck and forcefully removing an accessory.

That doesn't make sense.

It's this malleability of violence that enabled the Florida Supreme Court to reach such an erroneous conclusion. If everything and anything can be considered violent, then eventually we'll reach a place where nothing is.

These changing definitions of violence are ultimately a distraction because they call the top nine legal minds in the country to correct them by debating the mechanics of snatch-and-grabs, instead of facing the larger questions like why someone committed a violent act or whether the Armed Career Criminal Act's mandatory minimum sentence provisions are just.

If defining violence is just a language game, then it's "The Hunger Games" of semantics because the stakes are high. Everything — from bail, to inmate classification, to eligibility for rehabilitative programming, to parole decisions — boils down to whether we think a person is dangerous, and our sole method of measuring that potential is whether or not they've been convicted of what we consider a violent crime.

A majority of people in correctional facilities are there for violent crimes, and their opportunity to reform themselves or to earn release depends on these often silly delineations of the nature of their behavior.

We know violence when we see it. It's not our duty to redraw its contours but to repair its effects, rehabilitate its cause and then forgive it.