PUNISHMENT IS A LANGUAGE

“You haven’t done anything yet,” she reasoned with him. “All you have to do is let me go and take my car.”

As the tension wore on, Weinstein became more personal. She told her abductor of her six-year-old son and the foster child she and her husband hoped to take in. “I want to give something to somebody . . . give something back.”

It was to no avail. The youth took her to a remote wooded area and smothered her with her own coat. He didn’t notice the tape recorder.

Three days later, a hiker found the body. Mrs. Weinstein had carefully solicited details about the youth — his first name, his age, where he went to school, what his father and mother did for a living. The search quickly led to Michael LaSane, a 17-year-old living in a South Toms River housing project. When arrested he was in possession of Mrs. Weinstein’s car. He had told everyone he bought it for $ 1,500 for his birthday.

A cut-and-dried case of felony murder? Not so fast. The day after the story broke, the New York Times sounded what will undoubtedly be the theme of the defense: “Abduction Suspect Wanted a Car, But Would He Kill for It?” Describing LaSane as “an average teenager who liked to play basketball,” the story quoted numerous friends, relatives, and schoolmates pondering whether LaSane was really capable of such a horrible act.

“I think somebody is playing him for a sucker,” ventured one acquaintance. ” He bought the car from someone who is letting him pay for the crime.”

“None of us want to believe that any student in our community is capable of something like this,” lamented his high school principal.

Have we been down this road before? We certainly have. Two years ago, in an almost identical case, Edward Summers, a 22-year-old Bronx college student, took a bus to a shopping mall in suburban Rockland County and hijacked a jeep from two Nyack teenagers, Michael Falcone and Scott Nappi. Holding the pair at gunpoint, Summers assured them over and over, “I’m not going to hurt you.” Then he drove them to a secluded area and shot both in the head.

Miraculously, Nappi survived. He made it to a neighboring house and called the police. The jeep was spotted on the Bronx River Parkway. Summers fled the car but was captured after a wild chase through the woods.

Another cut-and-dried case? Not at all. Summers, who had apparently watched a lot of television, had a ready alibi. He had been forced into the whole carjacking by “Dino,” a mysterious drug lord who supposedly held his entire neighborhood in thrall. Summers couldn’t even provide a physical description of Dino, who supposedly was at his side during the entire crime. But the name had a nice Italian ring to it and conjured up visions of the Mob.

Portions of the New York press went for it, hook, line, and sinker. Right on cue, the Times sounded the inevitable question: Why would such a promising young man kill someone just for a car? Two months before the trial began, New York magazine ran a cover portrait of Summers, together with an “exclusive jailhouse interview” that lovingly detailed his alibi and mocked Rockland County prosecutors for not trying to find the mysterious Dino. (That Nappi, the surviving witness, testified repeatedly that Summers acted alone made no impression on the editors.)

The aftermath was instructive. At the trial, the defense actually produced a 42-year-old Bronx barber named Deno, who testified as a friendly witness. Although he professed no knowledge of the crime, he was put on the stand to prove that police had not checked out all the possible Dinos in the Bronx. Then, in a sensational move, Summers’s attorneys wound up their case by charging that the friendly barber was in fact the Dino who had forced Summers to commit the crime. Members of the jury nearly fell out of their chairs laughing and convicted Summers on all 23 counts in an hour and 20 minutes.

Mrs. Weinstein’s killer will probably not get away with it, either. (Although don’t be too sure. In Florida a few years ago, the tape of a murder, accidentally recorded on a telephone answering machine, was ruled inadmissible because it unconstitutionally invaded the defendant’s privacy.) But the real question posed by these cases is, Why does the liberal press, and the popular ular culture in general, have such a difficult time acknowledging that feral young men are committing such brutal crimes?

They do, of course, every day. Only days after Mrs. Weinstein’s murder, an African immigrant supporting a wife and family was shot in front of his house in Queens by two teenagers who wanted — his car. The price of a human life has been bid down as low as a leather jacket or a pair of designer sunglasses. This is exactly what liberals and media fantasizers refuse to face.

The simple calculus is this: With murder no longer punishable by death in most parts of the country, an armed robber can improve his chances of getting away with his crime by killing the victim.

Commit a robbery, and you let yourself in for three years in prison, the median time served according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics; rape will get you five years. So what happens if you eliminate the principal witness to your crime? According to the BJS, the median time actually served for murder in this country is now eight years. Despite all the “life sentences” being handed down, the real risk is roughly doubling a short prison stay.

Now look at the advantages. By murdering your victim, you greatly increase the chances that there will be no one to alert the police or eventually testify against you. Fewer than half the felony murders in this country are ever solved. If Mrs. Weinstein had not had a tape recorder in her pocket, would Michael LaSane be facing murder charges? Not likely. If Edward Summers had been more professional and finished off Scott Nappi, would he still be in college? Without a doubt.

Early criminal reformers were exquisitely aware of the need to draw a bright line between robbery and murder. “It is a great abuse amongst us to condemn to the same punishment a person that only robs on the highway and another who robs and murders,” wrote Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws (1748). “Surely, for the public security, some difference should be made in the punishment. . . . In Russia, where the punishment of robbery and murder is the same, they always murder. The dead, they say, tell no tales.”

In America, this view was taken to heart. In most states throughout our history, felonies and felony murder were differentiated. “Crimes of passion” – – murders of relatives or friends in the course of arguments — were punishable by prison sentences. Murders committed in the course of other crimes were punishable by death. The last person executed in New York state was a petty criminal who robbed an East Harlem bar. One woman was slow in handing over her pocketbook, and he shot her in the head. A routine crime today, hardly worth note in the newspapers, but in 1963 it got you the electric chair.

John Coughlin, a retired New York City police detective, often speaks out for the death penalty. He should know. As a rookie patrolman in the 1950s, he spent several years protecting store owners along Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue. “At the time, we were allowed to stop and frisk anyone who the store owner believed was “casing” the place,” says Coughlin. “These searches often turned up guns — which meant an immediate arrest under the old Sullivan Law.”

What surprises Coughlin in retrospect is how often the guns were unloaded. ” At least a third of the time, there were no bullets in the gun, or the firing pin was missing, or the gun had somehow been disabled. These guys wanted the fear the gun would bring, but they didn’t want even the chance that someone might accidentally get killed during the stick-up. They knew a robbery meant jail, while a murder meant the electric chair.”

Unfortunately, liberals missed this point. When the Supreme Court overturned all state death penalties in Furman v. Georgia (1972), it was because this punishment was used unevenly from state to state. (Furman was scheduled to be executed for rape.) But liberals argued that the death penalty wasn’t necessary anyway. In fact, it was nothing more than a ” barbaric relic” of an earlier era. We were much more civilized now.

Time and history have proved this spectacularly wrong. One of the favorite statistics cited by death-penalty opponents in the 1960s was that 90 percent of all murders resulted from arguments between relatives and friends. “The death penalty won’t prevent these murders,” they argued. “They’re committed without forethought.”

True enough. Unfortunately, since that time, the murder rate has nearly tripled. Yet crimes of passion have declined to less than half the total. According to the latest FBI statistics, more than 50 percent of all killings are now “stranger murders,” committed in the course of another crime. These murders were being deterred by an effective death penalty.

Punishment is a language. It is society’s way of communicating with its members. The simple message of a swift and sure death penalty is: Your life is worth the same as everyone else’s. It’s a nice, democratic principle. Once upon a time, it was part of everyone’s consciousness. People used phrases like “going to the chair” and “hanging for it” as checks against their potentially murderous impulses.

Today no one carries around this internal logic. Even in the states that do have capital punishment, the process is so slow and tortuous that people on death row may die of old age before they face their sentences. Most executions now are for crimes committed in the 1980s and 1970s. All this filters down. A few years ago, in an article entitled “Too Young To Die?” the New York Times Magazine lamented the fate of an unfortunate Texas inmate on death row for several felony murders he had committed as a teenager. His complaint? He had never heard of the death penalty.

The failure to draw that bright line between felonies and felony murder is particularly consequential for youthful amateurs — exactly the offenders the liberal press finds so sympathetic. In truth, Edward Summers probably never intended to kill anyone the day he went “shopping” for a jeep to replace one whose motor had burned out. He probably carried the gun to seem more convincing.

But once an armed robbery begins, a fatal logic sets in. “These people know me,” the criminal says to himself. “They’ve seen my face. As soon as I let them go, they’ll run and tell the police.” Now it is the criminal himself who is getting scared. Often the victim is more rational. “I’ll make you a promise that I won’t tell anybody,” Mrs. Weinstein told her kidnapper. But who can believe that?

And so the victim can only beg for mercy. “For my life!” she pleaded. ” Don’t you think should be concerned and let you take my car? For my life?!”

But what if she had been able to say: “For your life! Do you really think taking this car is worth your life?” Would that have made a different impression ?

William Tucker, a writer living in Brooklyn, contributed “A Little Girl Murdered” to the December 18 issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.