Hacker News Reader

Comment by moneytalks | Hacker News Reader

Can't believe we're to the point of debating whether a private educational institution can base an admissions decision, in part, on a past murder conviction.

This isn't about redemption or rehabilitation. No one is suggesting she's going to beat, starve, abandon and murder another 4-year-old. That's very unlikely.

But, what we are suggesting is that a private institution should be able to consider a person's entire story in their admissions decision.

Crimes have consequences beyond the government imposed sentence. But maybe the issue here is that the woman's punishment was much less than what most people would consider full justice, so they feel compelled to mete out slightly more to compensate.

And you say, but look at all she's contributed to society with her research! And I say we'll never know what her son may have contributed and she took him from the world.

View on HN

>>But maybe the issue here is that the woman's punishment was much less than what most people would consider full justice, so they feel compelled to mete out slightly more to compensate.

Peoples justice is not justice, it's revenge. You can't cherry pick the decisions of the justice system to fit your personal world views. You either believe in the ability of the justice system to impose the correct sentences, or you don't.

This private institution can base their decisions on anything they want, but in this particular case the reasoning is asinine and cowardly. It has nothing to do with her as a person and everything to do with a bad PR incident.

> It has nothing to do with her as a person and everything to do with a bad PR incident.

Yes. The rejection is not about further punishing Ms. Jones. It is about protecting Harvard from bad press.

Is it unreasonable that Harvard admissions be based in part on protecting its image in the publuc eye?

Harvard's image isn't going to be compromised with an altruistic admission, they just don't want to stand up for rehabilitation.

Consider what that says about their integrity, their culture, and their goals as an institution.

Do you really think their image wouldn't be compromised by selecting a convicted child murderer for their PHD program? I can't imagine the US would majority poll in support of that, and I doubt it would differ across party lines all that much either.

To put in perspective, we're still at 60% support for the death penalty in this country.

Criminal justice attempts to align punishments with the public's sense of fairness, not the other way around.

When people regularly feel compelled to mete out vigilante justice, it's a sign that the justice system is broken not people's sense of fairness.

The alternative is to make the criminal justice system into some kind of religion lecturing to the public about what value system they should have.

And, here, if you polled the general public you'd like get an overwhelming majority who believe that serving 20 years in prison for the beating, starvation, abandonment and murder of a child was too light a sentence. Habitually ignoring such sentiment is detrimental for a society long term as people lose faith in the government being able to protect them and maintain the right to be the sole arbiter of justice. (Avoiding mob justice is equally important, but this is not a case of ambiguous facts or uncertain guilt, just whether 20 years could ever be the right sentence for this abhorrent crime.)

Remember, governments get their power from and serve the people. Not the other way around.

I see your point, but nobody is saying the time she served wasn't adequate - yet still they want to force punishment.

Nobody would be complaining if she was trying to receive a HS diploma. But throw a prestigious school in the mix and all of a sudden its an issue.

But this is exactly about what punishment should be. She was judged and punished by the laws that we have created. Extrajudicial punishment is arbitrary and unstandardized. Furthermore, this social exclusion after prison drives increased rates of recidivism. Reformation would be a benefit for society and the individual. Also, her son could have been the next Hitler as much as the next Jesus. I have never been convinced by that type of argument.

Why fall back to this level of abstraction? We know the facts of this case. Do you think this particular decision was a good one or not?

And I say we'll never know what her son may have contributed and she took him from the world.

Odds are, as an African-American son of unmarried teenagers subject to a horrific excuse for public education, he would already have been a victim of the "justice system". Like all of our Wars, our Wars on Drugs and Crime are not designed to be "won" by any of their direct participants. Killing one's own child, whether before or after an arbitrary event, is an act of hopelessness. It's not hard to understand how someone without hope could do regrettable things. Nor is it hard to understand how the status quo's educational mascot, or at least the administrative cretins who have seized its control from the faculty, could react in a knee-jerk, shambolic, thoughtless manner to "support" that status quo.

('98)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com