"Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice?"

The title of this post is the headline of this fascinating article appearing in Sunday's New York Times Magazine.  The piece is about a sad Florida case in which a young man shot and killed his girlfriend and the role a restorative justice process used thereafter shaped the defendant's prosecution and sentencing.  There are lots of interesting passages in the full piece, and but this passage early in the piece caught my attention because of what it reveals about prosecutorial discretion and the distinct interests (and power) of some victims once they know the prosecutor's legal options:

“Unfortunately I have a lot of experience talking to the parents of dead people,” says Jack Campbell, the Leon County assistant state attorney who handles many of North Florida’s high-profile murder cases.  Sheriff’s deputies who were investigating the case told Campbell that the Grosmaires’ feelings toward the accused were unusual, but Campbell was not prepared for how their first meeting, two months after Ann’s death, would change the course of Conor’s prosecution.

Campbell had charged Conor with first-degree murder, which, as most people in Florida understand it, carries a mandatory life sentence or, potentially, the death penalty.  He told the Grosmaires that he wouldn’t seek capital punishment, because, as he told me later,  “I didn’t have aggravating circumstances like prior conviction, the victim being a child or the crime being particularly heinous and the like.”

As he always does with victims’ families, he explained to the Grosmaires the details of the criminal-justice process, including the little-advertised fact that the state attorney has broad discretion to depart from the state’s mandatory sentences.  As the representative of the state and the person tasked with finding justice for Ann, he could reduce charges and seek alternative sentences.  Technically, he told the Grosmaires, “if I wanted to do five years for manslaughter, I can do that.”

Kate [the mother of the murder victim] sat up straight and looked at Campbell.  “What?” she asked. Campbell, believing she had misunderstood and thought he was suggesting that Conor serve a prison term of just five years, tried to reassure her.  “No, no,” he said. “I would never do that.”  It was just an example of how much latitude Florida prosecutors have in a murder case.

What Campbell didn’t realize was that the Grosmaires didn’t want Conor to spend his life in prison.  The exchange in Campbell’s office turned their understanding of Conor’s situation upside down and gave them an unexpected challenge to grapple with.  “It was easy to think, Poor Conor, I wouldn’t want him to spend his life in prison, but he’s going to have to,” Kate says.  “Now Jack Campbell’s telling me he doesn’t have to.  So what are you going to do?”

“He’s so sorry he said that,” Kate says now, of Campbell.  “I mean, it opened the door for us.”

I urge readers, before clicking through to read the full New York Times piece, to consider what might have happened once a local prosecutor "opened the door" to a murder victim's family simply by telling them about the legal discretion he possessed to seek a more nuanced form of sentencing justice. I also welcome readers to opine on whether this story should be considered a vindication or violation of victims' rights given that the local prosecutor ultimately engineered a plea deal with a locked-in prison term that differed significantly from the sentence urged by the victim's family during the restorative justice "pre-plea" conference process.