Crime Classification Manual

56 CRIME CLASSIFICATION MANUAL
of “God” that has less to do with justice and more to do with who is deciding
another’s fate. Crime classification for them retains relevance only
long enough until an apprehended offender can be marched out to receive
his or her stoning. The insensitivity of such backward ideologies reflects
in the limitations of accountability for their police work. They do not value
life as precious and do not value individual liberties, so no one cares if
unsystematic and unscientific crime investigation leads to penalizing the
wrong person.
Likewise, court systems modeled on rehabilitating offenders need not
concern themselves with practical considerations like applying punishment
for its deterrent effect and therapeutic consolation to victims and their families.
Those societies, typically afflicted with boundless rationalizations for
predatory elements, relegate those invested in prosocial and law-abiding
behavior in the pursuit of utopian visions of universal compassion. Justice
for them is closely linked to presumed forgiveness. Such court systems also
are inherently compromised. At the expense of stark accountability for war
criminals and other unthinkable offenders nevertheless nurtured in their
midst, the courts of such countries opt to cover their eyes so as to preserve
the delusions of their society’s pacifism.
While American justice and law enforcement are closely scrutinized for
their imperfections and criticized for them, their openness to growth and
evolution is the embodiment of justice. The utility of and need for punishment
carves out a coexistence with compassion and rehabilitative goals.
Numerous factors diminish punishment, or the severity of sentencing, in
American courts. An offender’s previous history, social disadvantage, presence
of mental illness or possibility of coinciding intoxication, lesser role in
a crime, stature in the community, and negative impact of the punishment on
others are examples of qualities that mitigate punishment. When these factors
distinguish an individual, American courts may choose to mete out a less
severe sentence to a convicted offender. Mitigating factors primarily relate
to context, such as who the offender is and why the crime was committed.
Factors that aggravate punishment in criminal courts have been distinguished
as well. Some of these nearly sixty aggravating factors, like mitigators,
relate to who an offender is. Many, however, focus attention on the
crime itself—what the person did.
Aggravators Relating to the Crime Itself
Of all the themes of aggravating factors, aggravators linked to what a person
did in the course of carrying out a crime most protect the justice system from
bias, prejudice, privilege, and other unintended inequalities in sentencing.
The subjectivity of assessment of future dangerousnessness, for example,