A year ago, Bruce Emery chased down a youth who was tagging his property, stabbed him to death, then went home, concealed the evidence and went to sleep. These facts were not in question. His trial just ended; he was sentenced to four years and three months for manslaughter. Cue a storm of argument about whether this sentence was sufficient, with the dead boy’s mother announcing her disgust.
I’m not a fan of prisons as a fundamental component of our criminal justice system. I am not a fan of throwing people away for longer to make society feel better. That said, I am invested in ensuring our criminal justice system is unbiased; that it does not systematically treat better or worse people of different kinds. That’s the essence of the charge against Emery’s sentence, that were he not a white middle-aged middle-class businessman then his sentence would have been greater.
A common theme in the discourse around the sentence (see, if you dare, the NZ Heralds’s “Your views” reader feedback section) is of understanding about Emery’s action, and of a willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt, to empathise: there but for the grace of god… This of course reaches its sickening nadir in a notice from the sickening hypocrites at the Sensible Sentencing Trust that Emery shouldn’t have been jailed at all, and the family deserves some blame for letting a 15 year old boy roam the streets.
Anita at Kiwipolitico brings a lot of this together in an interesting post suggesting that Emery received a reduced sentence because he is “one of us”.
I think that’s not quite right; I think a better frame is to say that people who aren’t Emery receive greater sentences than he because they aren’t one of us. In other words, I don’t think the problem is that we have collectively extended our understanding to Emery; I think it’s that fail to extend the same understanding to those who aren’t like Emery. There’s a general failure of empathy.
This NZ Herald coverage at the time of the trial emphasizes Emery’s “ordinariness”, particularly his physical ordinariness – fat and middle-aged. Unspoken, is his whiteness, but it is there in the text because the question begged is “whose ordinariness”? Is being a fat, white, middle-aged man really ordinary? Would the victim and his community see it that way? What does that make them?
The ordinariness of his behaviour became an issue in the case:
Did he react as an ordinary person would? Was he fired by anger that his home had been defaced again? How did anger influence what happened when he and the two taggers confronted each other in a neighbouring dead-end street 365 metres from Emery’s home?
But what about the ordinariness of the victim’s behaviour, getting stoned, tagging some fence; how is this not ordinary? Isn’t this extremely unremarkable stupid kid behaviour? That word “ordinary” is at work in this discourse, allowing empathy for Emery’s circumstances and behaviour, while at the same time excluding the victim.
When Emery killed Pihema, it fed into a general theme of youth fear, a cultural conversation we were having in our country about whether our young people were out of control. That conversation has lapsed in the last year, and is almost forgotten – no doubt because the election is over – and now the frame is about property, and pressure, and how sometimes you get pressed to breaking point and can’t we all understand that?
I can understand that. I don’t begrudge Emery his relatively light sentence; I hope he learns from it and is not destroyed by it. I only wish that the same empathy could somehow be offered more widely.