Coming Out

"We are just shocked by this result and it is so unjust," Lynn Chen, a cousin of Parkland victim Peter Wang, said. "How can he live another day?"
Parkland school shooting: Why the gunman was spared the death penalty

Aside from the fact that even a sentence of death by execution does not result in the sentence being carried out immediately, in the end, it is because three jurors voted against execution. But prior to that, because this is the way the system is set up. And the goals of the justice system are not to provide those who feel they have been wronged by a criminal, no matter how severely, with some sort of sense that someone is acting on their direct behalf.

According to Benjamin Thomas, the jury foreman: "That's how the jury system works. Some of the jurors just felt [life in prison without the possibility of parole] was the appropriate sentence." And Mr. Thomas is right. There's nothing about what happened that lies outside of Florida law. But that's procedural justice. What many people are looking for is what is called substantive justice, or the idea that the outcome lines up with certain ideas of fairness; generally their own.

From my imperfect vantage point, it appears that a lot of people are expecting what the philosopher John Rawls termed "perfect procedural justice;" in other words, a legal process, that when followed correctly, results in the expected substantive justice. This, of course, goes beyond criminal courts. Many people (many members of Congress among them) expect that a properly decided Supreme Court case will result in the outcome that they (despite not being Supreme Court Justices themselves) have determined to be the correct one. Or that if an election is truly free and fair, then their chosen candidate will be the winner. And in this, the machine can be run both forward and backward. Since perfect procedural justice always results in a substantively just outcome, any outcome that deviates from a given standard becomes proof that the correct procedure was not followed. And at the end of that line of reasoning is the idea that one need not understand the machinery itself, since the outcome tells one all one needs to know.

(I think that this is part of what drives a certain dislike of expertise; attempting to explain that Florida law makes the sentencing phase of a trial into a form of "pure procedural justice" is taken as a complex, and false-hearted, argument against genuine justice, rather than simply laying out how the system works, and perhaps why it works that way.)

The disconnect between procedural and substantive justice can be difficult to accept, especially in situations where one is on the wrong side of said disconnect, because people generally understand genuine substantive justice as mirroring their personal understanding of what is fair. And so a procedure of justice that produces the "wrong" answer is obviously unfair. But the reason why societies must fall back on procedural justice is that fairness is personal, accordingly, there are few, if any circumstances, in which any given outcome will be seen as fair, and thus conforming to the rules of substantive justice, for any and all people. And given the general propensity of people to be inconsistent in their understandings of fairness, an observer might well conclude that a system that perfectly aligned with any one person's  understanding of substantive justice was, in fact, wildly arbitrary, having no predictable rules at all other than giving the individual whatever they wanted the outcome to be.

But such is the way of things, given that people tend to believe that their own conceptualization of justice exactly aligns with whatever the objective ideal of justice is. But in a society of hundreds of millions, the lack of a clearly objective ideal means that any number of people are set up to be disappointed.