[HN Gopher] The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal reb...
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The trial of a child soldier who became a brutal rebel commander
Author : whocansay
Score : 31 points
Date : 2021-02-18 20:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (narratively.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (narratively.com)
| solutron wrote:
| Evil doesn't have to have remorselessness or have awareness of
| it's evil to be evil. Ongwen is clearly traumatized. But, he is
| also the trauma. The spread of death and despair by his hand has
| to be adjudicated. Life in prison is the most morally just
| outcome for him, regardless of whatever reformations or personal
| developments he might make. Some things can't be undone and the
| consequences have to be lived with, forever. Like, he could
| become an international voice for reforming child soldiers,
| educating policy makers, and literally every good thing he could
| do with his experience. Yet, he should still be in prison.
| Forever.
| swinnipeg wrote:
| It is curious how the trauma from his kidnapping is considered
| different than if he had been a 2nd generation war criminal.
|
| Presumably the child of a war criminal would also have suffered
| trauma in youth, but there would no consideration of mercy, or
| sympathetic longform articles for the 30something 2nd
| generation war criminal. They would be simply be treated as
| evil.
| onethought wrote:
| Is prison to punish? Rehabilitate? Or both?
|
| I feel like we could be way more creative in how we treat
| prisoners in how they "repay their debt". Someone like Ongwen
| could probably be very valuable in finding and converting other
| people away from situations similar to his. Or from helping
| security forces secure against the kind of tactics they used...
|
| I don't know random thoughts, but we can punish someone and
| have value generated at the same time.
| marczellm wrote:
| The article's veracity for me becomes questionable when it
| mentions that his father was a Catholic lay priest. No such thing
| exists.
| yial wrote:
| Since it says that he was a teacher, could they be using it to
| say that he was not an official ordained priest?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laity
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priesthood_in_the_Catholic_Chu...
| marczellm wrote:
| I understand what the article means: he was a catechist. A
| priest or a layperson can be a catechist. But lay is the
| opposite of priest.
| nugget wrote:
| Isn't "a Catholic lay priest" how you'd best describe the
| person, in colloquial terms, to a readership that wasn't
| familiar with the definition of catechist?
| throwanem wrote:
| No, I'd define the term. That's not hard to do -
| especially if you're willing, as the article is, to spot
| the reader knowledge of the difference between laity and
| ordination.
|
| To be clear, I'm not OP, and I don't judge the quality of
| the article on this basis. It's commonplace to see a
| journalist do sloppy work, especially in parts of an
| article less critical to its thesis. But the article
| _already_ defines the term 'catechist', albeit
| incorrectly. I don't think it's unreasonable to consider
| that the same trouble should go toward getting it right.
| gowld wrote:
| Catechist is defined, inside of one line, using terms the
| audience knows: "Catholic", "lay", and "priest".
|
| The silly objection here is like objecting to the
| statement "he was a pilot, an airplane driver", because a
| "driver" drives a car, not a plane.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| We either view Ongwen as an morally culpable human who is capable
| of making moral choices (certainly by the time he reached
| adulthood) and hold him responsible for those choices, and likely
| lock him away for many, many years as punishment for the horrible
| choices he made.
|
| The other way is that we view him as so broken by his childhood
| trauma that he has had no moral capacity, even in his adulthood.
| If that is the case, he still needs to be locked away for many
| years, because someone with that level of brokenness is not safe
| human society.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _If that is the case, he still needs to be locked away for
| many years, because someone with that level of brokenness is
| not safe human society._
|
| Or rehabilitated.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(penology)
|
| > _The effectiveness of Norway 's methods is evident as they
| hold the lowest recidivism rate worldwide at 20% as of December
| 2014._
| akiselev wrote:
| I too feel that rehabilitation, not vengeance, should be the
| goal of the justice system but in this case, I think it's a
| moot point. This is an individual with the means and clear
| history of organizing and wielding violent armed groups which
| (I hypothesize) requires a level of emotional intelligence
| that justice systems are not equipped to rehabilitate by
| design. The ones that try to rehabilitate offenders naturally
| err towards giving people the benefit of the doubt in order
| to make the process fairer for the falsely accused which is
| very easily exploitable, especially for the well resourced.
|
| I think this individual presents a clear cut case where
| public safety is more important than the individual's right
| to rehabilitation post-conviction, in a way that even the
| worst civilian criminals like serial killers do not. There is
| just no way to reintegrate him to like a POW of an opposing
| nation in war or a rebel soldier who joined a movement - he
| was a primary instigator in the conflict and his enemy was
| the system he'd be rehabilitated into.
| belval wrote:
| He is not a felon convicted for illegal possession of a
| weapon or drug dealing, he's a warlord that killed a lot of
| people brutally. Presenting rehabilitation as a possible
| solution here is laughable and almost insulting to the
| memories of his numerous victims.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue.
|
| People in Norway rarely grow up in totally deprived, violent
| conditions. Maybe they respond to rehabilitation efforts
| better, in the same way that a healthy person exhibits better
| wound healing than someone with diabetes 2nd type.
|
| One could make a practical experiment by dumping an
| assortment of, for example, Islamic State executioners into
| Norwegian prisons and watching how many of them return to
| their old habits, but Norwegians wouldn't probably want to
| try that.
| convolvatron wrote:
| how much of that is due to basic social safety net?
|
| on the creek behind my workshop, thieves were running stolen
| copper. they would use boats to come up into businesses
| storage yards from the SF bay, then dump the copper in the
| creek. wait until they had a buy lines up and pull it up at
| their leisure.
|
| they were caught eventually. 5 years later and out on parole.
| and guess where they came first - back to the creek. no other
| way of making a living, no basic support.
|
| i think criminality becomes very different when its just a
| lifestyle choice and not the only way to provide for basic
| human needs.
|
| sure, focus on rehabilitation. but it doesn't matter if they
| throw you back on the street when you're out.
| selestify wrote:
| There's still that 20% that fails to be rehabilitated. This
| seems like it would be one of those cases.
| f154hfds wrote:
| There's a sort of disconnect going on in our sense of justice
| between gaining explanatory power to describe why a person did
| something, and that person's culpability. We seem to think if
| we can understand why they behaved in such a way (for instance,
| they were victims themselves, they had a mental disorder, etc.)
| they must merit compassion. The converse is perhaps more
| troublesome: if we can't understand how someone could have done
| that thing, it is somehow more heinous.
|
| My view is that this dynamic in our collective compassion does
| not help us accomplish justice. It seems that to pursue justice
| we must believe in agency of the individual. Agency to, no
| matter what their circumstances, make the right choices. As
| soon as we begin to weigh our explanatory power over individual
| agency we lose justice. Am I happy this man met justice? No,
| it's deeply sad and points to an irrevocable brokenness in
| humankind. Was it deserved? Yes. It was.
| ip26 wrote:
| I think the short summary is we are coming to understand
| circumstances where an individual has lost their agency. In
| which cases the nature of justice changes.
|
| _if we can 't understand how someone could have done that
| thing..._
|
| If we are not aware of a reason they did _not_ posses agency,
| then we must assume they still had it.
| hntrader wrote:
| The big problem with this is that our recognition that
| there's extenuating circumstances (e.g a brain tumour in
| the prefrontal cortex) says more about our capacity to
| recognise such situations than it does about actual
| differences in agency between individuals.
|
| For example, we might say that a serial killer who was born
| into a life of wealth and advantage and has no macroscopic
| brain damage has more agency than the individual with a
| large brain tumour. But this killer is also very much a
| slave to their brain in the same way as the tumour
| individual. They were gifted with psychopathy and an
| inability to feel remorse, which will undoubtedly come down
| to concrete brain states that differ in a material respect
| to non-psychopaths. Just because we can't see any obvious
| macroscopic markers of this says more about our knowledge
| limitations than it does about relative levels of agency.
|
| Going further, we're all slaves to determinisic or
| stochastic physics playing out in our brains and
| environment, and our agency is just a useful fiction.
|
| The justice system should be premised on pragmatic concepts
| of deterrence, rehabilitation, protecting society, etc, and
| not on fantasy notions that person A had more agency than
| person B.
| smogcutter wrote:
| > But this killer is also very much a slave to their
| brain in the same way as the tumour individual.
|
| I think there's an element of, ironically, survivorship
| bias there. We notice psychopathic serial killers because
| they kill people, and then we say they lack agency like
| the tumor victim. But the psychopaths who _don't_ kill
| people are invisible. We just call them CEOs (jk, but
| only kind of).
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Going further, we're all slaves to determinisic or
| stochastic physics playing out in our brains and
| environment, and our agency is just a useful fiction.
| >The justice system should be premised on pragmatic
| concepts of deterrence, rehabilitation, protecting
| society, etc, and not on fantasy notions that person A
| had more agency than person B.
|
| Without a concept of agency it is pointless to talk about
| "justice". At the very least, by advocating a notion of
| justice, you are saying that members of society as a
| whole have agency to implement that concept of justice.
|
| If we all have no agency, how is a feeling that we should
| immediately execute all criminals unjust?
| Retric wrote:
| This assumes you define a person as a constant
| irrespective of everything else. In effect an 8 year olds
| must therefore be judged as harshly as anyone else.
|
| It's a consistent standpoint, but justice isn't about
| punishment. It's a belief that the world despite all
| evidence to the contrary should be fair. As such people's
| internal thought process is inherently part of the
| judgement process, the same action with different causes
| is judged differently.
|
| You're for example allowed to break some rules in an
| emergency therefore belief that something is an emergency
| is relevant. Punching someone doing a jump scare because
| you think their a threat is perfectly legal.
| hntrader wrote:
| I believe circumstance should be taken into account, but
| not for the purposes of assigning agency, which is a
| fantasy concept.
|
| It should inform the probability of recidivism, the
| chances that rehabilitation will work, etc, and therefore
| inform what type and duration of sentence/treatment is
| appropriate for a given case.
|
| To your example, belief that something is an emergency
| means that P(recidivism) is effectively the same as if
| they hadn't committed the action, which is the real
| reason why there shouldn't be any sentence given to that
| individual.
| vkou wrote:
| He did not take prior offers of amnesty, that went back to 2000,
| and only surrendered when his position in the LRA became
| untenable.
|
| This seems enough to condemn him. It's a complicated issue, which
| is why blanket amnesty gets offered in these kinds of situations
| - to people who want to re-integrate back into society. He did
| not do so until he had no other choice.
|
| The split personality disorder is a beautiful story, that fails
| to explain why he didn't surrender at any point in the preceding
| two decades. If we were to suppose he was not culpable for his
| actions during his Dominic B states, Dominic A must surely be
| culpable for not extracting himself from a situation where
| Dominic B would keep on committing his atrocities.
| gowld wrote:
| The "split personality" theory was ripped off from the Primal
| Fear movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primal_Fear_(film)
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(page generated 2021-02-19 23:01 UTC)