Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I did jail time in the Sixties for a peaceful sit-in against the Vietnam War. So (as with many things) my understanding of the issues involved in what may be termed “civil disobedience” is eminently practical as well as theoretical. I was very disturbed by a recent column in the New York Times by Kirk Johnson entitled “Do Motives Matter?” It discussed the DeChristopher case. I reproduce it in its entirety and discuss it below.
Do Motives Matter? The DeChristopher Verdict
Tim DeChristopher hugged supporters as he left a courthouse in Salt Lake City after his conviction. Associated Press Photo
The American legal system tends to pay obsessive attention to a person’s motives and mental state. A hate crime, for example, only becomes a hate crime at all with motive. Premeditated offenses often get harsher treatment than impulsive acts of rage or passion. The capacity to understand right and wrong is a fundamental threshold of competency in a courtroom.
OK, let’s stop right there. Part of that is simply untrue. In addition, he is conflating motive, premeditation, mental competence, and intent.
The American legal system pays almost no attention to motive. The only crime I can think of in which a person’s motives make a difference is a “hate crime”. This is a recent addition to the law. But if you murder someone, or steal their wallet, your motive is meaningless. You might have stolen to impress your girlfriend. You might need the money to feed your kids. Doesn’t matter, the jury will never hear about your motive. The only question the jury ever considers is “did you do it”, not “why did you do it”.
While premeditation and mental competence and intent are certainly issues to which the law pays “obsessive attention”, they have nothing to do with motive. All they are doing in his essay is confusing the issue. In general the person’s motive for doing something whether a person had noble reasons for committing a crime is legally immaterial to the jury. If motive enters into the record at all, it is only and solely in the sentencing phase, after the person has been found guilty and the jury sent home. Thus the judge acted correctly in doing what Kirk Johnson describes in mildly accusatory accusatory undertones as:
But in the federal trial of Tim DeChristopher, who was convicted on Thursday in Salt Lake City on two felony charges for trying to derail an auction oil and gas leases in southern Utah in late 2008, discussion of motive – at least so far as the jury got to hear – was almost entirely stripped away.
Judge Dee Benson told the lawyers that the case would not be about why Mr. DeChristopher did what he did, but only whether he did it. Federal energy policies and concern about climate change, which were in fact the core drivers of Mr. DeChristopher’s actions, as he has said in many interviews, would not be put on trial, Judge Benson ruled.
And he properly ruled so. DeChristopher’s motives are not relevant to the jury’s deliberations.
Does it matter? In covering the case for The New York Times, I found myself pondering a pretty deep question: In assessing offenses driven by environmental concerns, is an understanding of the “why” crucial to the truth? Or is it a huge distraction because of the politics and complexity and controversy that swirl around the subject?
Is his motive “crucial to the truth” or a “huge distraction”? I would say neither. I would say that an understanding of his motive in the context of what is called “noble cause corruption” is useful in understanding the current sorry state of climate science. In either case his motive does not matter to the law, nor should it.
Would the jury have assessed things differently if the defendant’s deeper psychological portrait had emerged – specifically his belief that risks to the planet and the future are so dire and urgent that rules must be broken?
Or is the “rule of law,” as an assistant United States attorney, John W. Huber, put in it his closing argument, crucial to civil society — the linchpin of protecting everything we have, including and perhaps especially the environment?
I have no sympathy with this argument at all. Why on earth should I care about Mr. DeChristopher’s “deeper psychological portrait”? I don’t generally turn over rocks if I fear that there are strange things under them … I’m not interested in what lies under Mr. DeChristopher’s actions. I have enough problems with the creatures that live under my own skullcap, I have no interest in the unknown denizens of Mr. DeChristopher’s cranium.
Certainly, Mr. DeChristopher, a 29-year-old economics graduate, is no eco-terrorist. This was not an Earth Liberation Front firebombing; the closest he got to violence was raising his bidding paddle at the auction to buy land leases with money he didn’t have. But there was also little doubt, as he had also conceded in interviews, that he broke the law by signing federal forms while posing as a legitimate energy buyer, and then by bidding successfully for upward of $1.8 million in leases from the federal Bureau of Land Management.
Again, I’m not clear what the relevance of this is. He is not an eco-terrorist. He is also not a kidnapper or a child molester … so what? What does that have to do with his case? Is he saying we should have sympathy for him because he is a “white collar criminal”? Because I generally have less sympathy for that breed of crook, not more. I’ll take an honest bank robber over a bank accountant who steals the same amount of money, any time.
In a statement after the verdict, the United States attorney for Utah, Carlie Christensen, addressed part of this debate, one that will no doubt continue in Mr. DeChristopher’s probable appeal. “Whether the B.L.M. was correct in its decision to offer these parcels for oil and gas lease sales was not the question which this jury was asked to resolve,” Ms. Christensen said.
Nor should they be asked to resolve it. It is not a question for the jury.
Look, I have no problem with Mr. DeChristopher’s actions. As I mentioned, I did the same myself, and I did time for it. As we said then, if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. However, I never heard the New York Times opining that the judge should have considered my motives in deciding my guilt or innocence. It didn’t matter. I was guilty. As is DeChristopher.
What I have a problem with is when this kind of thinking slops over into the scientific arena. You see, if a scientist thinks it is ethical to break the laws of civil society in the name of saving the planet, I have absolutely no confidence that the same man will not break the laws of honest, transparent, ethical science in the name of saving the planet. As we have seen, sadly, this more than a thoretical threat.
When this occurs in science, it is called “noble cause corruption”. It occurs when a scientist thinks that their cause (saving the world from Thermageddon) is so important and so noble that it transcends plebeian concerns. Their cause is much more critical and vital and important than, you know, mundane boring things like transparency, and scientific integrity, and archiving data that may not agree with your hypothesis, and revealing adverse results. For scientists like that, those are petty scientific concerns, things that only apply to people who are not engaged on a mission from Gaia.
This noble cause corruption, amply personified by Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Gene Wahl, Caspar Amman, Gavin Schmidt, James Hansen, Stephen Schneider, Lonnie Thompson, and far too many other leading lights of AGW orthodoxy, has been the root cause of the mistrust of the public in climate science.
And reasonably so. When the public sees top-notch, world-renowned climate scientists lying and cheating and breaking the rules and stuffing the peer-review panels and subverting the IPCC, what do you think will happen to the reputation of the field?
Judith Curry and others keep presenting this as a communications problem. It is not. The AGW folks think the problem is that they’re not getting the word out. So they’ve formed some kind of Guerrilla AGW Killer Rapid Response Ninja Suicide Death Commando Team to answer questions, at least I think that’s the name … guys, lack of AGW scientific opinion is not a problem as far as I can see, quite the opposite. We’ve heard your scientific claims of upcoming catastrophe proclaimed at full volume over and over. And over. And over. The problem is not that your message is not getting across. We hear it. It’s crystal clear, no problem with either the medium or the message. RST is five by five, as the ham radio operators have it.
But most folks simply don’t believe anything you say. You’ve lied to everyone before, you conned us in the past, people are determined it won’t happen again.
The problem is that a large number of the top names in the field have been shown to be, well, liars, cheats, and thieves. They were working hard, in secret, using deplorable, unethical, and likely illegal tactics to advance their noble cause and to protect their secrets and their data and methods.
Now, if that were all, it would be bad. But it is worse than that. If, when all that was revealed, the rest of the honest, decent climate scientists had stood up and pointed and said “For Shame!”, the breach in trust could have been repaired. If the miscreants were identified and disowned by the majority of climate scientists, there would have been problems, but not huge problems.
But that’s not what happened. When the Climategate rock was rolled over, and the UEA nest of scorpions was revealed and they started running from the sunlight, with few and notable exceptions the good, decent, honest climate scientists suddenly found something else really fascinating to talk about. About how it was just boys being boys. About how it was just scientists talking trash about each other in private. About how Climategate meant nothing. About how the use of “hacked” emails was unethical. The overwhelming majority of the good honest decent AGW supporters talked volubly about everything under the sun … everything except the putrid scientific rot Climategate revealed within the top ranks. Nor did they say a peep about a succession of ludicrous whitewash investigations apparently led by Inspector Clouseau of “Pink Panther” fame … silence and closing the ranks was the order of the day.
So as a result much of the general public in the US at least believes that all climate scientists are crooks. They’re not. They’re mostly just reasonable, curious scientists who tragically were unwilling to speak up for scientific honesty and integrity when history called on them to do so. And as the saying goes, for scorpions to succeed, all that is necessary is for good climate scientists to do nothing.
After all of that, anyone who thinks that what we have is a communications problem, or that it can be solved by better scientific explanations, or that it can be fixed by reframing the discussion, is seriously deluding themselves. Someday, good science will eventually win out. Not communication. Not reframing. Good science.
But until then, I can assure you that if a climate scientist says it’s raining outside, any reasonable person will surreptitiously glance out the window …
w.
[Update] There is an outstanding comment below:
Turn this around when thinking about the “profit motive” such that the “profit motive” were a valid legal defense. A really scary thought, that one is.
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@willis
“Should we allow a CEO to claim he is innocent because he was motivated by profit?”
Yeah, why not? Just as he should be allowed to claim he did it because the Moon was in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligned with Mars.
The judge’s duty is to instruct the jury in the law. In this case his duty is to inform the jury that astrology is not a recognized excuse and they should ignore it. Then the jury’s power to decide takes over. The jury cannot be compelled in any way nor suffer any punishment for reaching one verdict or another. Their deliberations and reasons for reaching one verdict or another are secret. They may decide based on their conscience rather than the evidence if they so desire.
The only way to thwart the jury’s power to judge the law as well as the lawbreaker is to exclude evidence or testimony from ever reaching their ears and/or fail to instruct them that they are free to use their conscience instead of the law to guide their decision.
You wrote “if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime”. I agree with that but I believe a corollary applies to the government “if you don’t have the time, don’t try the crime”. Exlcuding motive or extenuating circumstances from the courtroom for expediency turns our trial by a jury of peers system away from a fair justice system into a robotic manufacturing line for legally correct verdicts.
Mike Lorrey;
I find myself astonished that I am onside with someone vs. Willis. The case is even stronger in one respect than you present. As of the Paris Accords, the US and SVA had won. Then followed years of illegal rearmament of NV by Russia and China, to cricket chirps in the silence from the Western Media. And abrogation of the basic support guaranteed SVA, by the Democratic Congress.
That duplicity, plus the unremitting media distortion and demonization of the US by its own Filth Estate, was what ultimately handed Ho his prize.
Dave Springer;
Jeez, two in a row! Again, I agree with your position vs. Willis’. Juries are often irrational, but there must be a means of “breaking” the law when it is “a ass, a idiot”. Like bureaucratic regulations*, laws are dependent on the imaginations and abilities to logically extrapolate of the framers for their applicability to the myriad of real world situations and events which they end up dealing with. Unintended Consequences and sheer bone-headed oversight are common enough to require a mechanism to divert injustice and raise red flags.
* It is worth remembering that both are generally written by the same people or kinds of people: the nameless faceless staff of the elected lawmakers and the nominal heads of bureaux who front them. I remain, e.g., very curious about just whose thousands of man-hours actually went into the composition of the Health Care Behemoth Bill, which sprang from Pelosi’s forehead all stuffed with Democrat sugarplums, within days, it seems, of Obama’s inauguration, ready to be passed so we could then read it. And who directed and paid for all that beavering away in the shadows.
I frequently find petty officials to be narrow minded and lacking a sense of proportion. Judge Christensen seems to be one of them.
TALLBLOKE
You totally miss the point, sadly, because you have not shown that tendency in the past. The law is designed to be a rigid framework in which we are all guided and protected. By definition it requires narrow minded people to implement it. Proportion in law only arises after the event and allows the framework to modified or changed according to the circumstances surounding the case. Willis is right, you are wrong. Not wishing to annoy or confound but you appear have a natural aversion to authority a bit like me and Willis. Think about it.
Brian H says:
March 13, 2011 at 4:08 am
Dave Springer;
Jeez, two in a row! Again, I agree with your position vs. Willis’. Juries
It is neither the jury’s right or role to pass judgement on or to change the law. You are there to assess the evidence against the law as written under the guidance of the Judge. ONLY A JUDGE has the opportunity to modify the law through the unusual circumstances of a particular case based on the veidence of that case and that can most often only occur by rfeference to the highest court of your country. No matter what Springer may have said in the jury room he was not in a position to carry out his threat and if expressed in the presence of the judge could have EVENTUALLY been held in contempt. Evidence only for the jurists.
juanslayton says:
Anton: “‘Blind religious credulity and thoughtful skepticism are not the same things.’
“Indeed not. Anthony has asked us all to avoid religious controversies, and with good reason. Still, the Book has a great deal to say about motives, rules, laws and truth. All of which are intrinsic to any discussion of noble cause corruption. Don’t want to put words in the saint’s mouth, but I think Paul would agree with Willis’s position on this issue: And why not say (as some people slander us by saying that we say), ‘Let us do evil so that good may come’? Their condemnation is deserved!”
Evidently Anthony’s good reason was not good enough for you, so here’s my response.
“The Book” as you put it, isn’t a book; it’s a collection of writings, many of them plagiarisms of older pagan works. For instance, the parable of the mustard seed, laughably put into the mouth of Jesus, was plagiarized almost verbatim from Buddhist scriptures.
I don’t care what the so called saint Paul said. After reading his idiotic observation on potters and sewer pipes (God is supposedly a potter, and some people are supposedly his sewer pipes, created to be damned because He wants it that way), which some Protestants turned into the doctrine of Predestination, I’d had enough of the exalted Paul.
Excluding Islam, almost every surviving old religion on Earth, from Bon to Hinduism to Buddhism to Christianity, condemns lying, and takes the position that the ends do not justify the means. Christianity isn’t unique in this, and quoting its scriptures isn’t impressive. They are not intrinsic to the discussion here of noble cause corruption.
I beg to differ on the books of the Bible. They are charming, ugly, and everything in-between, enlightening human stories of nearly everyone’s quest: to figure out the “why” of our individual and collective lives. Read in that vein, in which the reader should properly tear off the back of the book’s cover and continue to write the stories, they are filled with cautions, advice, parables, and real-life sagas of the human quest.
Who wouldn’t benefit from such a thing as that? Did you build your house on the beach? Did you put a Nuke plant on a major fault? Did you pour your foundation next to a river? Do you put your life; lock, stock, and barrel, in the saving grace of a government? You were warned.
Several posts above talk about owning several SUV’s, referring to whether or not those things are necessities, wants, or just to make envy. There is nothing wrong with owning. If you have the money, own whatever you want to own and suffer the gains or consequences of such a thing.
However, there comes a time when at least some folks in this state of success, become unwitting dependers on government slop in the trough. If you own several homes, can you survive off the grid, especially without stocked and banked money? It is hard enough for one person in one house to survive on their own resources.
Take stock of how much “stuff” you have that would be severely harmed if the land under your feet or the government you live by collapsed. It would be well for those who own much to understand they will lose much in disasters and may find themselves whoafully unprepared to physically survive, let alone materially survive.
Willis,
“Ho and his guys would have hid in their insane underground rabbit-warren cities, and come out even more determined to kill us with stones if they had to. He had fought fifty years, and it was simple. He wasn’t going to stop. He wasn’t going to quit. He wasn’t going to negotiate away anything. He was going to win if he had to crawl on bloody hands and knees to do it. Against trucks and tanks and ships and jets, they won the war on bicycles. Bicycles! And if they hadn’t had bikes, they still would have won.”
One of the best pieces of prose I’ve read in a long time.
Somewhere we have missed the phrase ‘The ends justify the means’. Trotsky wrote a small book examining the (dielectical) interelationship of the Ends and the Means. Specifically in ‘There morals and ours’ he argued against the Webbs etc who excused and hid from their eyes the Stalin purges purveying the line of the CP that everything was fantastic and the party was building a new future for mankind. It was the next stage in the development of humanity. Many went to the USSR taking the official tour and returned believing this to be so ignoring the purges, the frame ups, the Moscow Trials, the judicial mass murder and so many other items of evidence.
Indeed, quoting Trotsky verbatum
“Did these people realy beleive the Moscow accusations (show trials of former bolshieviks turned traitors)? Only the most obtuse. The others did not wish to alarm themselves by verification. Is it reasonable to infringe upon the flattering, comfortable and often well-paying friendship with the Soviet embassies? Moreover – oh, they did not forget this! – indiscreet truth can injure the prestige of the USSR. These people screened the crimes by utilitarian considerations, that is, openly applied the principle, ‘the end justifies the means’
One can easily replace the USSR with Climate Science, but no one will ever state what their real final goal is. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the majority of the Climate Scientists are Democrats.
Trotsky goes on to state the play Franz von Sickingen, by Ferdinand Lasalle where he puts these words into the mouth of one of his heroes:
‘…. Show not the goal. But show also the path. So closely interwoven are path and goal that each with other ever changes, and other paths forthwith another goal set up….’
The interesting part in this was the aim to building of a society of super abbundance with the phrase ‘from each according to their ability to each according to their needs.’ We can already see the germ of who is deciding what their needs are. Nowadays they talk not of superabbundance but of a new type of growth, ie. negative.
Anton: …almost every surviving old religion on Earth, from Bon to Hinduism to Buddhism to Christianity, condemns lying, and takes the position that the ends do not justify the means.
Pretty much my point. But I disagree that that position is not essential to a discussion of noble cause corruption. One needs some foundation for the corruption part of that phrase.
Willis Eschenbach says:
A lot.
============================
Brevity is sometimes the best type of explanation.
You said earlier,
“So don, I make no judgement on the actions and choices of anyone who was touched by the war. I am not qualified to do that, nor is anyone I ever met. You did what you felt was right, as did I and others. As Bob Dylan commented,
You’re right from your side, and I’m right from mine.
We’re both just one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind.
Let it go at that, even the photos are faded, let the dead past bury its dead. We have new battles to fight now.”
==============================================
Should have been all that was stated and left there. The memories and wounds are still fresh for many.
Btw, tallbloke appears to have introduced a name/title confusion into the discussion. There is no “Judge Christensen”.
She is the United States attorney for Utah, Carlie Christensen.
The ruling is by Judge Dee Benson. (Him’s a her, like Carlie.)
Stephen Richards;
The actual unpalatable truth is that juries are indeed empowered to vitiate and over-rule the law if they so choose. As I said, it’s a necessary inefficiency in “The System”. Judges hate it, and warn and fulminate against such subversion of their authority, but there it is.
Sorry you don’t much like the taste!
Just for the record, I think DeChristopher is a jerk***, his opinions and tactics both inane, and that he got what was coming to him.
That’s exactly why in science it is imperative that your data and methods be shared, open and transparent and your results be reproducible and ideally your hypothesis be falsifiable. Virtually every field of science has contentious issues to be hammered out on the anvil of scientific method, every researcher has an emotional investment in their hypothesis and theories that will stand or fall in the light of objective peer review and replication; Climate Science isn’t special.
The American justice system was founded on the concept of blind justice; the fate of the accused is not based in circumstance. Why? to prevent the rich and famous from bending the system for thier purposes.
While modifying the outcome of this case to assess motive may seem noble in the eyes of the New York Times such a practice can just as easily be used against it’s best interests.
So how does the Times want the justice system changed? Extend each trial to discuss motives and extenuating circumstances. Isn’t this exactly the opening a rich defendent would need to game the system? Defence lawyers might also enjoy the new system.
The rest of us not so much.
About 20 years ago I had a friend who was a criminal defense attorney. He told me a story about a client he defended some years before. The client was a pharmacist and worked in a local drug store. He was caught stealing narcotics. And here’s where motive matters. They caught the pharmacist red handed and he did not deny stealing the drugs. What changed his world is what he told the investigators when they asked him why. He truthfully told them he was taking them for his wife who was in intractable pain and was under-treated (they didn’t have many “pain specialists” back in those days). This changed what he was charged with. Had he claimed he had taken the drugs for himself he would have faced disciplinary measures from his licensing board and probably be ordered to participate in drug rehab. But because he had taken the drugs for his wife who was suffering in pain he was charged with trafficking. He lost his license and did jail time. Technically he committed a different crime as soon as he transferred the controlled substances to another individual but they didn’t bust him for that. He admitted it when asked of his motive. It was a tragic story. The guy’s wife committed suicide while he was in jail. But, by golly, the community was safe from the illegal use of controlled substances.
Paul;
In the sense you mean, Climate Science indeed gets no special dispensation. But it is “special” in a number of crucial respects.
A partial list:
–It’s new, infantile. “Climatology” is an invented subspecialty of physics, requiring skills and tools from a dozen others to be done well (as so far it is generally not);
–It pertains to public experience and life in a way few others do;
–It is making claims about ongoing and imminent global changes and events which have vital and deadly implications for a near(?) majority of the population;
–It is benefiting from a lion’s share of public research funding;
–It is using computer extrapolations (“projections”) as a tool to sample possible futures and make recommendations about how to shape them — a process utterly dependent on the validity of said models. Which it resists establishing in the standard ways.
And more. I doubt you can name another field with analogs of even two of the above characteristics.
The reason the “good” climate scientists don’t complain or otherwise out the bad actors is the money is too good, the federal grants are too juicy, so they make up stories to themselves to justify protecting the funds.
Concerning the bible, Pamela Gray says . . .
“Who wouldn’t benefit from such a thing as that? Did you build your house on the beach? Did you put a Nuke plant on a major fault? Did you pour your foundation next to a river? Do you put your life; lock, stock, and barrel, in the saving grace of a government? You were warned.”
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Instead, people read the stories and behave as told, stoning people, including their own children, to death, abusing animals, and living like savages, all the while claiming they’re doing something good. Once again we see the complete disregard for in inborn conscience in favor of a supposedly desired ends: in this case, God’s favor and/or a diminution of His wrath.
I don’t use terror-tales to guide me through life. I actually think about what I’m saying, doing, or anticipating, and the direct. and possible ripple, effects, and comport myself accordingly. But, none of this is relevant to the essay in question. The warmists HAVE decided the ends they imagine justify the means they indulge in, and to hell with everyone else. They HAVE made “climate science” look idiotic and filthy, and brought guilt by association upon everyone involved else in it. The many academics, celebrities, politicians, investors, journalists, and laypersons who have rushed to their undeserved defense, and who are involved in their shameless damage-control efforts, are every bit as corrupt, or completely gullible and self-destructive. The so called Team is a cancer corrupting everyone it touches or who willing touch it, and until “climate scientists” in general isolate it and prevent it from doing further damage, they will never again be credible.
Brian, you have touched upon the precautionary principle in your insightful list. “Post normal” science is a return to the snake oil science of years gone by. It isn’t post-anything. It is meant and polished for public sale, not public education, just like it was decades ago. Snake oil in a new bottle.
Excluding Islam, almost every surviving old religion on Earth, from Bon to Hinduism to Buddhism to Christianity, condemns lying,
————————————————————-
Excluding Islam?
I am not aligned with any of the religions mentioned. But suggesting that Islam condones lying is just ludicrous.
Perhaps the quote about the mote in one’s own eye is apposite here.
Anton, I actually agree with your statement about bibles. Some follow it like they have bull ring in their nose attached to the thing. What I have come to understand is that we all, regardless of creed, have our bibles, don’t we. I hold mine loosely yet still find it instructive and wise, even in its trumpeting of stories made of whole cloth and pure fiction inside it’s well-worn pages. I think it wise to read our own choice of bible with this in mind: be it Green, Christian, Pagan, or the Koran, they are likely filled with stories of how to do something wrong as if it were the right thing to do, as often as they advise the right way to do a thing when in reality it is just the opposite.
If you read my last statement in my comment to Anton, very carefully, you will get the full meaning of why I find such texts a fascinating read.