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.
Luddite Journo’s post kinda captures that sense of “whose ordinariness” when she talks about the lack of empathy and kindness toward Pihema.
Young people are always out of control. Othering them is not the answer, whatever the question is. Well, unless the question is “how do we best alientate them and make them hate us”, in which case we are creating our own problems.
I do begrudge the light sentence, because it’s a symptom of privilege. The only redeeming feature is that it stands as a good example of patriarchal privilege.
Good spin.
Without knowing much about the case or even following it, one has to wonder exactly what the Prosecution was looking for. As both sides get to refuse jurors until they get something balanced, shouldn’t the prosecution have been looking for a jury that wouldn’t treat him as a peer, and if they failed to get that, were they treating him as one of us.
While not wishing to enter into a debate on the length of sentence, other than to agree that the verdict of manslaughter was correct and a jail term appropriate, I don’t think the parental responsibility factor is one that can be ignored, if only for the fact that if Cameron had not been out doing what he was doing we would not be having this discussion in the first place.
He is not one of “us” he is one of “Them”.
Anita: that is a really good post, isn’t it?
Moz: Yes to a more inclusive attitude towards youthful folly! I agree about privilege being abhorrent, but light sentences in general are closer to the society I’d like to be part of.
Billy: ;P
Jarratt: I don’t know enough about jury selection; I think it might have been a difficult task to find a group without more negative affect towards the victim than the attacker.
Samm: Sorry but I have to differ. I think the parental responsibility factor can and should be ignored when we’re talking about Emery’s sentencing. It doesn’t matter how the kid ended up there, whether he was from a good family or bad, or anything; what matters in this part of the conversation is Emery, what he did, and what that means. There is a good conversation to be had about parental responsibility, but mixing it in with the conversation about Emery’s actions suggests that the parents bear some responsibility for their son being killed by Emery. That I cannot accept.
2trees: We “Us”es know what we’re talking about.
Jarratt: The Prosecution and Defence can each challenge only 4 Jurors (without cause).
Beats me how Emery escaped with Manslaughter. His actions fit squarely within the statutory definition of Murder. He doesn’t come close to meeting the tests for either Self-Defence or Provocation. It is interesting to note that the media’s repeated, (and in my view, erroneous), reference to Emery’s ‘ordinariness’ does reflect the language used in the objective limb of the ‘Provocation’ section…
Miri – that was my uninformed assumption, that it would be a clean fit for murder – I read somewhere that the “provocation” was how manslaughter got on the table.
Re: your final comment about “ordinariness” – can you elaborate?
Sure. Without clogging your comments section too much, in brief: “Provocation” (s169 Crimes Act ’61) reduces culpable homicide that would be classed as ‘Murder’ to ‘Manslaughter’. It’s defined as being anything said or done that, in the circumstances of the case, was sufficient to deprive a person having the power of self-control of an ORDINARY PERSON, (but otherwise the characteristics of the offender),of the power of self-control (and did in fact do so).
I fail to see how your standard kiwi, (even with Emery’s personal characteristics), would grab a knife, run 300 metres after a child and proceed to stab him to death for defacing their fence. Provocation is usually noted in cases where Battered Spouse Syndrome is raised as mitigation for the offender’s conduct.
Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language 😉
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo