On June 10, 1991, 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped on her way to school in South Lake Tahoe, Calif. Today, the whole world pretty much knows what happened after that. Two heads-up UC, Berkeley police employees cracked the case on instinct alone last month, with Dugard and her daughters Angel and Starlet thrust into the spotlight. Dugard and the girls, apparently fathered by Dugard\u2019s rapist, are the central figures in a grisly, almost otherworldly tale of captivity, slavery and, happily, \u00adjoyous reunion. Phillip Garrido and his wife Nancy allegedly held Dugard and her daughters in their Antioch backyard for 18 years, a compound of tents and heavy flora shielding them from view. There\u2019s been some talk about bad police work surrounding that arrangement, chiefly in the person of an officer who didn\u2019t inspect the lay of Garrido\u2019s land as judiciously as the law allows. That allegation, along with several others inside the mountain of paperwork this matter will generate (including the suspicion that Garrido killed as many as 10 prostitutes), will play itself out in due course, with as ideal a result as Dugard\u2019s rescue itself. But there\u2019s a bigger issue at work here\u2014that of the justice society will exact from the Garridos, who as of last week were on suicide watch at the Contra Costa County jail in Martinez. As things stand, they could face multiple life sentences on 29 felony charges. Meanwhile, one newspaper reported that they may be subject to the death penalty. And although that information is inaccurate, it does spark a certain concept of just deserts in the minds and hearts of an outraged public. I\u2019ve always been pretty liberal in my sociopolitical views\u2014the way I see it, you only go around once, and I\u2019d prefer a far less provincialized society around me to that end. Capital punishment, however, is an issue I take a certain heed on. It\u2019s absolutely true that no person has the right to sit in judgment of another, especially in matters of life and death\u2014which is why we have 12 jurors, not one, and a series of alternates to hear most criminal cases. Moreover, we have decades of trial and error and an avalanche of documentation in our attempts to fit the punishment to the crime; even after all that, capital punishment still stands as a legal consequence in many quarters for the most heinous offenses. I\u2019ve been thinking about Jaycee\u2019s case a lot because it touches so close to home. Recently, someone very dear to me was horrifically injured at the hands of an ex-boyfriend whose jealously had inexplicably turned militant. Her recovery is proceeding miraculously; the perp is in for the judicial ride of his life. There\u2019s a small, sick part of me that wishes him the gravest of ill in the days ahead\u2014but in this society of laws, governance must come first. It\u2019s the nature of that governance that may bear new scrutiny. Plea bargains, prison overcrowding, milquetoast judges, confusion over legal rights and responsibilities in the Internet age: All seem to erode the rule of law, under which we enjoy a greater degree of freedom than without it. Dugard\u2019s ordeal is an ideal case in point. Garrido broke the law, it\u2019s said, by holding her captive for nearly 20 years, during which she may never have seen the light of day except for her work in Garrido\u2019s print shop. If the Garridos (and my gunman) are found guilty, society will have sanctioned what everybody\u2019s thinking\u2014that they deserve retribution under the fullest extent of the law. I\u2019m just not so sure the fullest extent is full enough. That decades-long trial-and-error routine featured escalated sanctions amid varying degrees of offense. Likewise, maybe it\u2019s time to revisit the capital punishment phenomenon, framing it as a last-resort declaration of our better selves.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On June 10, 1991, 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped on her way to school in South Lake Tahoe, Calif. Today, the whole world pretty much knows what happened after that. Two heads-up UC, Berkeley police employees cracked the case on instinct alone last month, with Dugard and her daughters Angel and Starlet thrust into […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11556","_seopress_titles_title":"Dugard case should spur capital punishment debate","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11556,11593,11552,11550],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-downtown-news","category-no-images","category-opinion","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}