March 03, 2007
Billy Cottrell
Billy Cottrell is currently an inmate at the Victorville Federal Correction Institution in Adelanto, CA. He has been sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for torching $5 million worth of SUVs in 2003. The LA Weekly has a feature story about him that came out a few days ago.
The article is interesting to me for a number of reasons. First, it highlights a problem with the criminal justice system as currently instantiated, namely the imposition of heightened sentences by judges on their own discretion. The California Supreme Court recently struck down such sentences, and there is reason to believe that the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will do so as well. Were that to happen, I think it fairly likely to be affirmed by the United States Supreme Court: divorcing sentences from juries isn't something the Court tends to like all that much, and a number of years ago they overturned any death sentences that had not been imposed by a jury.
Second, the article points out the suppression of evidence regarding Cottrell's diagnosis with Asperger's Syndrome, a kind of high-performance autism where people become brilliant at math and other abstract disciplines yet trade this for vestigial social skills and personal judgment. The article suggests that the District Court judge who presided over his trial and imposed an extra three years on his sentence didn't understand Asperger's and was biased against him for being a "terrorist". Though I do have some questions about whether his mental condition should have suggested a degree of leniency, there is little to suggest that he didn't actually do the things for which he has been convicted. It's my guess that the judge simply didn't care about his mental diagnosis: Cottrell is an arsonist, and the criminal justice system knows what to do with arsonists. You put them in jail for a long time. If we showed leniency to everyone with a mental condition, we'd probably have no one in prison, as most of the people there probably suffer from some kind of diagnosable condition, whether it's ADHD, dyslexia, or some other trendy psychological condition. I'm entirely prepared to consider no-foolin' psychosis as an excuse for a crime, but the "reasonable man standard" which judges and juries use to assess culpability is not to be impinged by lowering the standard to accommodate people with impaired judgment.
The article also alleges unfair treatment of Cottrell in prison, and while there may be something to this, as long as he isn't being physically harmed it's hard for me to get all that excited about this. He's in prison.
But the article also exposes a number of assumptions that I believe are downright dangerous. Chief among these is the seeming assumption that because Cottrell is smart - he's was a physics Ph.D. candidate at Caltech when convicted - that he shouldn't be treated this way. The article is entitled "A Terrible Thing to Waste", and advances the opinions of several scientists who say that Cottrell should not be treated the way he is allegedly being treated because he's smart, and that the solitary confinement in which he has been kept is really only for "violent thugs". In a strange way, this might almost be racist, as it seems to betray the assumption that harsh treatment in prison - or in fact prison at all - is only for "thugs", e.g. the poor, e.g. minorities. I would take a moment to point out that Cottrell has been convicted of causing over $5 million in property damage. Most average thugs won't do that much damage over an entire career, much less one night.
Second, the article betrays political assumptions about terrorism. Cottrell has been branded an eco-terrorist, as the vehicles destroyed were all SUVs and they were spray-painted with environmentalist slogans. The article heavily implies that the Department of Justice is irrationally concerned with eco-terrorism and is using Cottrell as a prototype. Be that as it may, the treatment in the article reveals the author's and publication's opinions on terrorism in general, i.e. they don't like President Bush.
The article also reminds me of this incident, where a UCLA student was tasered for not co-operating with the cops. The whole affair displayed an assumption that obedience to sovereign authority is really only for the underclasses, and that persons of relative privilege, e.g. college students, don't really have to obey those rules. Because Cottrell was a graduate student, the article - and the quotes from Cottrell himself - suggests that he shouldn't be held to the same standard as anyone else who has been convicted of half a dozen felonies.
So yes, I do think Cottrell's case merits attention from the Ninth Circuit, but I don't think they're going to do much more than reduce his sentence to the one imposed by the jury. Nor do I think they should do more than that. On the other hand, this is the Ninth Circuit, so who knows what they'll do. On the gripping hand, the Ninth Circuit is the single most-overruled circuit in the country.
Read the article. It's worth it, once you get past the sound of axes grinding.
