Crimes or Mistakes?

Betty Brock Bell has been a Justice of the Peace in Harris County (which includes the city of Houston, Texas) for the past 20 years. Recently she was tried and convicted of "Tampering With a Government Document, a state jail felony punishable by up to two years in a state (prison) jail. She had been charged with fraudulently renewing a handicapped parking tag in her dead mother's name. She had also been charged with perjury for telling a grand jury that she was conducting a personal "sting operation" to see how easy it would be to obtain the handicapped tag by fraud in order to explain why she had renewed her dead mother's tag.

Judge Bell happens to be an African-American and during the sentencing part of the trial, her character witnesses, mostly prominent members of Houston's black community, pleaded to the jury that she be given probation, rather than jail time, for making a MISTAKE. A State legislator even referred to her offense as a "simple error."

Until I retired as a criminal justice educator, I always believed that a crime is a crime is a crime. In recent years, however, the definition of crime seems to have changed depending on where the perpetrator fits into society. When a member of the underclass commits a crime it is still a crime. Now, however, when a privileged member of society commits a crime it is called a MISTAKE. Executives who have been convicted of corporate crimes are said to have made a mistake. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the Vice President's former Chief of Staff, is said to have made a mistake in his appearance before a federal grand jury. The only mistake Judge Bell and other privileged criminals made is that they got caught.

Perhaps we should revise our laws and establish a new two-tiered Socio-Economic Penal Code wherein the underclass are charged with committing a crime and the privileged, for the same offense, are charged with committing a mistake. And, of course, the punishment for a mistake is much less severe than that for a crime.