Life, Death, and Grammar

Now who would've thought I'd be blogging so much? Given how much I love to talk, I bet everyone but me!

I have been doing some volunteer work for the Texas Defender's Service, which helps lawyers representing people on death row in many different ways. I would not usually talk about my work with the death penalty, because I think it is of paramount importance that you (my students, my colleagues...anyone who doesn't solicit my opinion) make up your own mind. However, this is in the context of my belief in the Constitution and the rights it guarantees Americans. One is that in death penalty cases (and many others), the person who is accused--the defendant--has the right to a lawyer and to "due process," which pretty much means that the courts will follow the rules. The word "due" in this context means "your guarantee just because you're human" so you can think of due process as the process that you deserve because you're a human. So in that spirit, I'll tell you about one of the many quirky things about the criminal justice system.

If you think about it, the Constitution's guarantee of fair "process" doesn't sound like what we usually think makes justice. I grew up thinking "justice" means that you figure out the truth and then figure out what consequences everybody should get. But the Constitution doesn't say that kind of justice is what we are guaranteed. Instead, it says that the "process" will be just. "Process" means all the different steps you have to do to finish. So the Constitution says we all get the right to have all those little steps done without cheating.

In the case I was researching, I was trying to figure out whether the court that convicted the defendant got one of those steps wrong. To figure out the rule the court had to followed, I had to read a lot of rules, called statutes. And here is where the craziness started: to figure out whether a really important statute was broken, I had to analyze the statute's grammar. Really. Is the letter that accuses the defendant of all the crimes (the "indictment") written in the conjunctive or the disjunctive (does it have lots of "ands" or is it full of "ors"?). Then I had to figure out if there were transitive verbs, and if so, what the nouns they were paired up with meant. And that was only half of the work!

Who would have thought that a person's right to justice sometimes means that the only thing between life and death for a criminal is grammar?

Cheers if you actually stuck along for the ride. This was a complicated post!