Does the Universe Balance the Ledger?

On two cases that exposed the gap between punishment and justice, and why victims' rights rhetoric doesn't always help

We start today stuck in a rut. There’s an escalating war that we don’t want. Congress can’t get its act together. One decision after another from this administration digs us into a deeper ditch. It’s just the truth of the moment.

Then we turn to a societal truth that’s bigger than this administration.

Two recent cases have sparked public outrage. One involves a traffic accident in San Francisco that killed a family of four. The second involves two 14-year-olds in Pennsylvania who created hundreds of fake nude images of their classmates.

Long-time listeners know that I think our criminal legal system is still a long way from just. Most of the time in these conversations, I’m talking about the rights of the accused perpetrator. Today, we talk about how our systems are not set up for victims at all. We know on some visceral level that doesn’t work, but we can’t seem to imagine a new way.

Outside of politics, but not unrelated…we take up listener Kevin’s question: do we believe in karma? Come for a parsing of karma, holding a grudge, schadenfreude, and grace. Stay for a Survivor detour and a Taylor Swift sing-along. - Beth

Topics Discussed

• Iran and the Energy Crisis

• Punishment and Accountability

• Outside of Politics: Karma is a Vibe

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Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

• Join us in Minneapolis for our live show this August! Tickets are on sale now!

Iran and Energy

• Trump weighs ground operations in Iran.(Tangle News)

• Trump Officials Weigh New $1 Billion Deal to Stop Offshore Wind Farms (The New York Times)

• More to Say About the Pro-Inflation President (Pantsuit Politics Premium)

Punishment and Accountability

• Something Else Was Born: On War, Grief, and the Chaos Lottery (Pantsuit Politics)

• Good News for Fresh Starts (Pantsuit Politics Premium)

• Elderly driver sentenced to probation in West Portal crash that killed family of 4 (KTVU)

• Probation sentence sparks outrage in fatal SF crash case (CBS)

• ‘It could have been us’: West Portal struggles with the sentence (The San Francisco Standard)

• PA teens get probation after using AI to create fake nudes of classmates (WHYY)

• Teens who made deepfake porn of classmates were just sentenced. Will it make a difference? (News+ Membership)

• Teens sentenced to just 60 hours of community service (The Cool Down)

Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:30] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:32] This is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:33] You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today, we’re going to catch up on the headlines before moving to a discussion on punishment and accountability based on two recent cases, one involving the killing of a family of four in San Francisco, and one involving teenagers and AI porn. Outside of politics, we are going to continue with the theme and we’re going to talk about whether or not we believe in karma.

Beth [00:00:53] Before we get started, we want to remind you that tickets are on sale for our one and only live show of 2026. We are so excited to be coming to Minneapolis at the end of August, and we hope to see you there. You can get tickets to the live show, our after party, and the Spice Conference. All the information is in the show notes.

Sarah [00:01:09] Next up, let’s tackle some headlines. Beth, I hate doing the News Brief right now because I have to show up and say, another day, another day of headlines full of war and global energy crisis. And it’s just frustrating. You can’t depend on anything he says about the length of this war which they’ve been promising would be two to four weeks for approximately two to four weeks. And he continues to sort of lie about wrapping it up while clearly preparing to escalate. Ten thousand troops being sent to the area is an escalation in my book, anyway, slice it.

Beth [00:02:00] When I saw the church prayer list include requests for prayers for someone’s relative being deployed, I thought, “That’s how we know this is a war.” They can call it whatever they want to, but this is a war and it is breaking through into our lives, not just at the gas pump, but with people sending their loved ones off. I really appreciated Isaac Saul’s reporting in Tangle today where he said that he had spoken with a service member who was deploying and the person said, “I don’t know what my mission is.” And that is how this continues to feel to me. And I agree with you that in our jobs it’s hard for me to know how to talk about this because it feels so intense and like there should be a lot to say every day. But I’m just overall at a loss for how this administration is handling it. I’m at a lost on how to speak about this with respect for the people who are being deployed and their families. It makes me just feel pretty despondent.

Sarah [00:03:09] What is becoming increasingly clear to me is that he is only giving lip service to wrapping this up. That he is planning on, in some way, shape or form, occupying the Karg Islands where Iranians crude oil is processed. I was pretty surprised that he’s been talking about this for so long. There’s been lots of reporting quoting him from like the eighties and the nineties, like, we should just take these islands. I wouldn’t have known he knew where those were, could place them on a map in the eights or nineties. So that sort of surprised me. But he’s clearly planning on doing that, if not also using ground troops to go ahead and take the uranium, which seems completely out of the realm of achievability to me. I’m not a military expert, but it seems like the walking definition of a quagmire. Like we’re just going to keep throwing American bodies into a war with no clearly articulated goal, despite the last, oh, I don’t know, 100 years of learning in American history, that this is a bad idea.

Beth [00:04:32] It feel like the clearest illustration of his presidency that pride goes before the fall. He just thought this was going to be so easy. And we’ve been saying for the last couple of years here, every time we talk about war, it’s not easy. You don’t win a war anymore. That’s not how modern war works. And so if you aren’t really clear about what you’re trying to do, and you aren’t really transparent with your people about what the costs are going to be, and why those costs are worth incurring. I don’t know why you start something like this.

Sarah [00:05:05] Well, and I think what makes it all the harder is if we were going down this road and everything else was great, it would be one thing. But we’re not. The war he was supposed to end between Russia and Ukraine on election day in 2024 is still very much going on. Even the conflict between Israel and Gaza. Not all the way over and certainly not into any sort of phase two rebuilding of this area. And now you have this entire regional conflict. And then on top of all of that, you have the strain you put on the global economy through the tariffs, which is now being worsened through this energy crisis. Everything I read, everything I read from experts in this area is this is only going to get worse. Like, what we’re experiencing now. With regards to gas prices and concerns from, you know, the airline industry and farmers around fertilizer and all these other, you now, choke points or disruptions, they’re only going to get worse. They’re only going to get worse

Beth [00:06:20] The two finer points of that that I keep reading that I can’t stop thinking about are, one, probably today things are responding with a sense of optimism that Trump will back off soon. That Trump always chickens out idea is baked in to prices today. So that’s one piece that it should already be worse, but people believe that maybe he’ll stop. And then two, that even if he stops today, it’s going to get worse and worse and worse before it gets better. That the damage is already so acute that it will last even if today he says, great news everybody, the war’s over.

Sarah [00:07:08] And again, this is just through the lens of global disruption, foreign conflicts. Then we have all the chaos being created domestically through the lack of funding for TSA and Homeland Security. The Republican party is fighting amongst itself between the Senate and the House. The Senate sent a compromise to the House. They rejected it. Everybody went on vacation. Trump says he’s going to pay them through other funds, has not explained how. And again, just on top of all this, the chaos at the airports. So we’re coming on spring break, I’m doing both, I’m flying and driving, so I’m screwed either way. And all I can ever think about when trying to cover these problems and crises he creates is that we have actual problems we should be addressing. We have artificial intelligence. We have a crisis in public education and higher education. We have real problems. Healthcare costs are still completely out of control, not in the headlines anymore, but still completely out of control. We still have all this government debt that even the Freedom Caucus who used to be that’s like their primary thing, is not concerned with anymore. So it’s maddening. It is maddened to watch him go around and break things while stepping over the wreckage of the things that have been broken for a long time.

Beth [00:08:56] And there are so many bullet points underneath everything you just listed, right? Just this morning on the subject of artificial intelligence, I was reading about how the Pentagon is holding up wind energy projects that are capable of producing enough electricity for cities, for data centers. To the tech bros that Trump is best friends with tries to green light all of their stuff, they want these wind projects to go forward and the administration is just stalling on it, dragging its feet. When you talk about education, firing people, bringing them back, having paid them for months and months while their work wasn’t being done, creates uncertainty there. And then today in the headlines about healthcare are Republicans floating a plan to cut more under the Affordable Care Act in order to pay for the war in Iran. And so every landscape where there’s already tons of uncertainty, this administration chooses to inject more uncertainty. And they do it at every level. It’s hard to even pay attention to all the levels at which it’s operating.

Sarah [00:10:07] Yes, I would like someone to poll Americans if they would like their healthcare costs to go up to pay for this war that nobody wants. That would be a fun poll question I would like to see the results on. I mean, look, Beth, I have this morning routine where I listen to your More to Say as I get ready. And I pulled up your latest one on how he is killing green energy projects and propping up coal fired plants that either no longer run or pollute the air and use all this money And I just couldn’t do it Beth. I couldn’t press play. I was too mad already I was like I can’t. I cannot listen to one more way in which he is doing this. I looked at it and I was like I can’t. I can’t do one more thing where he’s just sending us backwards as China’s and I was reading reporting about how China’s Capacity is like twice ours already. They know, we all know, we’re going to need more electric capacity. And it’s like he is trying to not only stop renewables but push us back like less electricity, more polluting electricity. Again, it’s maddening. It’s madding.

Beth [00:11:21] Well, I don’t mean to force you to come into this world with me, but the TLDR of that episode is even worse than that because the administration is preventing coal plants that were going to be retired from retiring. So like two days before a plant is scheduled to officially sunset, they’re coming in and saying there’s an energy emergency, you have to keep this plant operational. The problem is it takes years of planning to retire a coal plant. And so contracts expire and staff gets reallocated and they start planning for that to maybe become a natural gas plant or something else. And problems that arise don’t get fixed because they know they’re going to be sunsetting. So there’s a plant in Michigan that I talk about in this episode where they’re spending upwards of $600,000 a day to just keep it online because the Department of Energy has said that they have to. So the Department of Energy says we have an energy emergency, we cannot possibly close these coal plants that everyone has said need to close because coal is the most expensive form of energy to produce at this point. But they also say that we have energy surplus and so we’re able to sell energy to Canada and Mexico whenever the needs of our grid are met. So there is no logic to any of the orders of this administration. It’s all vibes. It’s all partisanship and ideology. When a regulator says this coal plant needs to go offline, it’s because they’ve run the numbers. That’s not about climate change as a religion or anything that you want to say runs as a thread through advocacy and partisanship. That’s just money. And they won’t even let the people looking at the dollars and sense of it do what they think is right.

Sarah [00:13:16] Oh, God, it’s infuriating, and that’s what just makes it hard. Like, what else do we say except for it’s absurd? I do like Chuck Schumer’s chaos, corruption, cost, the three C’s of what this administration is wreaking havoc across the nation. But it’s like what else do you say? That’s the best part, I think, about the No King’s protests and the stuff that happened over the weekend. First of all, people are very creative in the ways they say it on the signs. That’s great. That’s entertaining. Love that. But I think it gives this outlet of like, well, I’m not just staring at my computer screen and going, ugh! I’m standing with other people saying, we don’t want this. This is not what we want.

Beth [00:14:03] Well, and you have to either stare at your screen and go, ugh, or make your sign and go out with people because the minority leader of the Senate, the best he’s got right now is describing the problem. That’s frustrating. Like good for you, I guess, on the three Cs, but do something about it, man. Like get creative, figure this out. Especially on the war front. I understand that Congress has been trying and failing. Keep trying and make the case to the American public. And again, when I am seeing in my community people being sent off to this thing, there is an opportunity to gather support and tell the president he is way out over his skis, way in front of where public opinion is here. I want some kind of meaningful congressional action here and get TSA back.

Sarah [00:14:52] I mean, bare minimum, they could have not gone on vacation.

Beth [00:14:55] Yes, that’s what I’m saying. The Senate unanimously says, we figure this out. We have a deal. And then they head out and leave the House to go, boo, the Senate. This is a joke. We don’t like what they did. So we’re going to go home too. We’re going to pass our thing and then go home, too. What are we doing?

Sarah [00:15:15] It’s outrageous. It’s outrageous. Good for everybody who joined in their outrage this weekend. I don’t want to wrap up this very frustrating section of the show without saying eight million Americans took to the streets this weekend to express their dissatisfaction, their frustration, their rage, their righteous anger with everything we just talked about and more. We didn’t even talk about ICE. Like, I just think that that is encouraging. They’re saying it’s the biggest protest since Earth Day in 1970. It’s incredible. I mean, clearly, clearly something is happening here.

Beth [00:15:53] Something is happening and I hope that the momentum of what’s happening can be sustained. Even as I desperately hope that some of these problems will get better, that cooler heads in the administration will prevail, that somebody in Congress will step up and seize their power too.

Sarah [00:16:10] Well, we’re are going to pivot and we’re going to talk about some individual court cases that caught our attention around a conversation that in some ways is a continuation of the conversation we had a few weeks ago about accidental killers and accountability and punishment. So the first case that caught my attention, Beth, was a case out of Northern California. March, 2024, Mary Fong Lau, who was then 79 years old and who was going at quite high speeds, went the wrong way down the street as I understand it, crested the curve and hit a bus stop. Showed people afterwards that she had confused the brake and the gas. She killed a family of four. Diego, the father who was 40, Matilda, 38, the mother, and their sons, Joaquin and Kao, who was only three months old. They were on their way to the zoo. She pleaded no contest and this month was sentenced to two years probation, a suspended license, 200 hours of community service. The prosecutors had pushed for more, but the judge did not give her any prison time. She did speak at the hearing and she said she was sorry, but there has been outrage on the behalf of the victim’s family who were devastated and felt like there was not acknowledgement really in this sentence for what they had lost. There has been backlash in the community as well. And I just thought it was a really interesting application. We talked about accidental killers. We talked about the victim’s family in Georgia with the teacher saying like do not sentence these teenagers. This was very different though. This was the victim family saying, this is not enough. We lost our entire family, this entire family unit. And I think it’s a really, really difficult case.

Beth [00:18:26] I don’t have words for how sad I am for this family and for this driver and the driver’s family. One of the hardest realities to discuss when you’re talking about the criminal justice system is that it is not built for victims. It’s built for society. You don’t commit a crime against a person or a family. You commit a crime against society and that’s why a society through its representatives prosecutes the crime.

Sarah [00:19:02] It’s not like the family versus so-and-so. It’s like the state of California versus so.

Beth [00:19:07] Right. And they say the people, right? When they represent the state, they say it’s the people. And so the punishment for the crime, what we decide constitutes justice in any individual case, is about a judge weighing within parameters set by legislatures, factors that are again about society and about the cost to society of incarcerating someone. About the risk to society of someone repeating their offense. None of those factors are about the victims. We have in fact written in the opportunity for victims to address courts and created victims rights bills along the path because it feels like that should be. It feels right, but I think it confuses the issue in a lot of ways because of course this family came away thinking, what the hell? Of course, they feel if our only answer for them is the punishment of the driver, then of course this feels inadequate. And that’s just a design flaw in our system. And when I say that, I don’t mean that I think victims should have more of an imprint on the sentence for a criminal. I think we very deliberately have to divide those issues because someone’s liberty being taken from them is a serious thing. When someone’s liberties being taken by the state, that is a series thing. And it can easily get tied up in what the victims want. And that’s too much pressure on the victims too. That’s not fair, right? There’s no good will come of the family here being able to say this is what we want, and then they have to live with that too. Society holds that responsibility for reasons, but we do need something that facilitates some kind of hearing out for the victims’ family, some kind of meaningful process where the victims family gets some relief. Mostly what we do to victims right now is re-traumatize them because they have to be witnesses in the criminal process. And so it is a heartbreaking failure all around. I don’t think the answer is going to be, let’s put more stock in what the victims want as punishment. But I think we do need something that helps people feel that they have another door when something horrible like this happens.

Sarah [00:21:44] Yeah, I’m just trying to really like press on my own thinking because in some ways I completely agree with you. I think some of the victims’ rights legislation has really polluted people’s understanding of the process. And I think that it’s problematic to empower the victims in some way because I think it confuses what we’re trying to do. But at the same time, I was like, well, this teacher’s family doesn’t want them to be punished and that should be enough. Or even though I’m in the opposite when a victim’s family is pushing for the death penalty, I’m like, well, that’s not really the point. You know what I mean? So I’m trying to really stress test my thinking. Am I just really using the victim’s families and the way we all do to try to get the outcome that we think is the most fair? And especially in this situation, it’s not just the victim family, it’s the whole entire community who felt like this is not appropriate. And we all feel very differently when we were talking about like Chanel Miller and the rape case where the judge was like he’s young and let him go. And people were like, no! You know what I mean? So it’s like I think that we all do this, right? Like we all use the prism of the victim’s families either to support what we want or to say, well, that’s not really the point.

Beth [00:23:04] I mean, look in the Georgia case where the teacher’s family has said we don’t want these young men or these young people to be prosecuted. We talked about that as a remarkable example of grace. And I think that’s so meaningful just to know that’s relational, right? That is a message, not just to the state, that will ultimately make the decision and ultimately did make the decisions not to prosecute. That’s a message not just the state, but that’s a message to those young people of forgiveness and grace. We don’t want your life to be over because of what happened here. That’s the depth of connection that I think everyone’s looking for. When I was reading about this case and the community’s outrage, it seemed to me that a lot of that outrage is kind of connected to the fact that there wasn’t an apology forthcoming earlier. That there wasn’t an expression of remorse that this person could possibly drive again under the terms of the sentence. I think accountability and punishment are so different from each other and the criminal justice system lumps it all together. Mostly I think what we want is accountability and on what we have is punishment. And to me, that’s the distinction between the Georgia case and this one. I wonder what this case would have been like if this family had since from the get Just an unbelievable amount of remorse. A clear indication that this person would not drive again. A sense that like this matters to me and this has changed my life and I do feel accountable for what’s happened. And I don’t want to pretend I know what’s going on with this driver, I don’t. From the news accounts, what jumps out at me is that distinction between accountability and punishment.

Sarah [00:25:08] Yeah. Most people pursue I guess what you could call accountability through the civil process after the system of punishment has concluded. That’s what we saw with O.J. Simpson. He was held civilly liable, even though he was acquitted in the criminal court. And there was reporting that immediately after the accident, this woman moved assets into a trust to protect them from civil litigation, which I think perpetuated this idea of like not only do you not care, you’re trying to protect yourself. Now she moved them back, from my understanding. But I think that that was a real miss on the judge’s part. I understand the hesitation to put an 80-year-old woman in prison. Truly I do. But why? Why would you allow her to get a license again? She said she wasn’t going to drive. Like, put it in there. That’s an easy win, dawg. Like, just put it there and say she can’t ever drive again. Because she shouldn’t be driving probably at that age anyway. I know everybody’s different. Hell, my 90-year-old grandmother’s still driving. But I think for me the unstated issue here is her age. The judge expressly spoke to this with the prison term, but it’s hard not to play the alternate timeline, where if this person had been 30, what do we think would have happened? I’m not really sure how I feel about criminal charges in the case of negligence. Involuntary manslaughter, involuntary vehicular manslaughter. I think those are really messy areas.

[00:26:54] I remember when we had little kids before a lot of the safety features had been put in place, there was a lot of people who would leave their kids accidentally in the car and the kids would die in the heat of the car, and they would criminally charge them for negligence and I’m like what is this? Like, if you are so negligent and somebody dies, you’re not a risk. You know what I mean? Like, are we putting them in prison because they’re afraid they’re going to do it to their other kid? Come on, man. So, to me, my view as a citizen that I’ve come to over time is I’m not trying to punish people, but I am trying to put people in places where they cannot harm someone else. And I do think, for better or for worse, there are a lot of people... I think about all the time Brene Browns, yes, they’re doing the best they can, but their best is dangerous. And I think there are people who their best is dangerous and they have to go to prison to prevent them from doing this crime again, from harming the same person again. That’s definitely been my experience in my work as a CASA. And so if that’s not the issue, then you are just talking about punishment. I just want to make you feel bad for what you did. I don’t think that brings any manner of justice to the state. I think then you’re getting into justice for the victims. And I’m not really even sure that’s what I would describe as justice. I think it’s something different.

Beth [00:28:27] We saw Chicago over the weekend, the Broadway show, and there is a joke that the defense attorney makes a couple of times in it about how he always has to remind the jury that a conviction of a killer doesn’t bring the victim back to life. And there’s a moment when he says it and the juror goes, oh my gosh, and it lands the joke really nicely. Like we don’t realize that. And I think that’s right. I think in the extreme stress created by crime-- and stress is too light of a word, right? The horror visited on people during a crime. It is not the victim’s responsibility to figure out how the state should punish the defendant because that is also cruel. It is cruel to say to the victim, you be responsible for the sentence. That’s not how this should work. Even civil trials are mostly about punishment. The punishment is just money. Because we can’t make people take accountability. That’s what we want. We want to force people to feel sorry enough. And sometimes there just isn’t sorry enough. Because what has been done, I mean, in this case with the driver, what has done cannot be undone and it’s awful. And you know how personal that feels to me. I live with the accountability. I didn’t even do anything wrong.

[00:29:55] But what happened when I was driving to another person cannot be undone no matter how sorry I am about it. And living with that is awful. And it’s something that our government doesn’t have an answer to. I think there are some answers out there. There are processes that governments facilitate to sit victims down with perpetrators or sit them down with someone who will listen as many times as they need to tell the story, as much as they needed to talk it through, to try to knit something back together when you feel like your relationship to the world has been destroyed because of crime. But we’re just not going to get at it with a harsher sentence. That doesn’t mean that I think judges should just let everyone go all the time. And judges are bound by state law. I don’t know what the judge’s opportunity under state law was to take her license. The judge might’ve been restricted in what the judge was able to do in this case. That is the thing with this system though, when you have laws which are blunt instruments, you’re always going to walk away from a criminal proceeding dissatisfied. There isn’t a good answer because harm is usually irreparable.

Sarah [00:31:07] Yeah, and I think that’s what we’re getting at. I think we are advancing in our understanding and our frustration with the criminal justice system, because I think are truly evolving, and I mean that in a positive way, in our understand of what causes someone to commit a crime or what factors-- not maybe what causes, but what factors are at play here. So in this case, you have one end of the age spectrum. And I think age is one place where we really have started to crack some of this apart. The other end of the spectrum you have this case in Pennsylvania, where you have two boys who are 14 at the time at a private school who created 350 AI-generated fake nude images of at least 59 girls, some as young as 12. They used school photos, yearbooks, Instagram, TikTok, all kinds of stuff. And they were also sentenced this month. They got six months juvenile probation, 60 hours community service, and $12,000 in restitution. They had 59 plus victim statements, girls who talked about how traumatized they were, how they didn’t go to school. They were depressed. And the judge acknowledged, like, if you were adults, you’d be going to state prison. But because you were 14 at the time, this is going to play out differently. And I think juvenile justice is a place where we really have started to emphasize rehabilitation over punishment.

[00:32:40] I did the reporting on this for the Good News Brief. Like the juvenile justice system has gone under a massive transformation in the last decade, two decades. And it’s played out in the federal prison population, which is about to fall off a cliff because we don’t scoop up young boys in particular when they are most likely to commit crimes and throw them in prison until they’re in their 60s. I think that’s an advancement in society. But I think as we’ve gotten better and better, I read a piece about some of the laws they’ve passed to help get women who were defending themselves and killed their abusive partners to set up different laws and punishment and probation. Now, most of them are not working, or at least in this particular case I was reported on that I read about, but there are some of these that are getting better. So we’re talking about how old are you? What’s your circumstances? Like we’re trying to make it a less blunt instrument. I think we really are trying. But I think when you get to a situation like this, I think, well, that’s what’s hard, right? We’re trying make it less blunt instrument at the same time we’re empowering victims. Which also feels like an evolution on the surface. But I these two things are kind of in conflict. This idea that we’re trying to get closer and closer to justice for the victims, while we’re also trying to get closer and closer to a more human, humane application of these laws, of these sentences. And they, I don’t know, seem like they’re inevitably going to come to heads, like in this case. I mean, people are furious. Even though these kids were 14, they’re furious that this is all that they’re getting thrown at them.

Beth [00:34:28] And I understand that fury. I have two daughters, get it. What in our justice system is designed to deal with the scale of a 14-year-old able to create so many images that are seen by so many people? I mean, the opportunity for crime has changed with the advent of AI and the internet and has been changing for a while, but this is just going to get worse and worse. And so as a judge, I don’t envy having to make a call like this, where you’re trying to analyze the intent, the awareness of the harm, the possibility for future harms. We don’t make fewer sexual predators by incarcerating people. We don’t incarcerate in a way that really produces better humans on the other side of it. So this is a really tough one and I don’t know how to accomplish what you look at a situation like this and wish for. I think if you’re on the outside, you are not immediately attached to this event. On the outside you would say, okay, we need a deterrent effect. We need to let kids know this is serious. Do not mess with this. This will ruin your life. And so we say, go ahead and have some sacrificial lambs, ruin some lives so that we can show everybody this is not what we do. I don’t think that’s very just either. I understand the societal impulse. This again gets back to like what is best for society in this instance? That’s what we’re supposed to be doing through the criminal justice system.

Sarah [00:36:13] I think that’s really, really hard. I mean, we went through this in my own community. The shooter at my high school was 14 years old. And before that, we decided as a society that we didn’t care how young you were as a school shooter, that we were going to charge you as an adult, which is really sort of the path we’ve adopted. He came up for probation in the last couple years. And one of the victims, one of those shooting victims said I have a son now, and I think that he should he should be cared for in a halfway house and be able to contribute in some way, shape, or form. And others were like, no, I have to live with this the rest of my life and so should he. I think the assumption there is that even on the outside, he wouldn’t be living with this, which I disagree with. But what was I going to do, argue with them? You know what I mean? I think we’re really at an impasse with the way we have really emphasize the voices of the victims, which I think, again, so well motivated. We can see why like we all want to do that. But I think we’ve lost this idea of like, but this is supposed to be for everybody. So what does it mean? What are the costs and the benefits for everybody? This is the debate I used to always get when I went to college and my freshman year and Sister Helen Prejean came and I was like, I am anti capital punishment and I still am. I am still against the death penalty vehemently.

[00:37:58] I’ll never forget relatives would say like, well, if they raped and murdered you or they raped or murdered your kids, how would you feel about it? Wouldn’t it be like, I mean, I hope the same way. But that was sort of like the Trump card, right? Well, if it happened to you, this is what you would want. I think that that is a limiting at best and dangerous at worst perspective. But I will say, I think, on the other end of that conversation it’s become this sort of like false dichotomy because I think what happened societally is, well, if you’re not articulating the desires of the victim, if you are not advocating for the victim then that means automatically what you really want to do is empower the perpetrator. That to me felt like where the conversation went. Like you have to pick a side. You have to a pick a side. Do you feel sorry for the perpetrators and you care about them or do you feel for the victims and you carry about them? And that’s a false dichotomy. I think that’s what we’re pushing at is like accountability and punishment and transparency or trying our level best to take this blunt instrument and make it more complex isn’t really just about one or the other. It’s about all of us and what this does to all of us and how this matters to all us and how the system serves or doesn’t, every member of society, not just the perpetrators and the victims. And not for nothing I don’t think true crime probably helps this conversation at all because it’s not like every true crime podcast or true crime episode of Dateline goes, well, really, what does this mean for society?

Beth [00:39:45] And honestly, unfortunately, that’s what we need. It takes imagination to think through what could accountability mean in these circumstances. It’s challenging. Just these two instances that we’ve talked about, we haven’t even gotten to the meta verdict and what kind of accountability and punishment we’re talking about when a social media platform is harming children through its use. It takes a lot to sit down and think, what would ideally happen under these circumstances? What is the message from society to these boys who created these images? What is that message from to these girls that is not about the boys? That’s what’s been so frustrating every time there’s been a high profile trial about sexual assault or rape. We sit around and we’re just talking about the perpetrator over and over and again because we haven’t imagined something that is really for the victim. Even with the girls and these AI images, what we’ve asked them to be in court is a victim. Do tell your story. Tell it and tell us how devastated you are. Publicize your injury here because that’s the only way that some justice comes out of that. Well, that’s not just. What sexual assault survivors have to go through in an examination following their assault is not just. It’s what we have right now, but we got to imagine something better. And we cannot ask people to imagine something better when they’ve been victimized. That is the work of media and storytellers and advocacy organizations. There are some phenomenal organizations that connect with victims now and try to help them go through their own process that has nothing to do with the perpetrator. We need a lot more of that. We need we need a a lot of that showcased so that the public has a vision beyond what we’re stuck in today.

Sarah [00:41:49] Yeah. I do think we’re really stuck from both angles. And I think there can be creativity, not just only through the lens of the victims, but from the perpetrators and a more integrated, holistic understanding of how people end up committing these crimes. Look, I don’t think we are going to get to some place where we eliminate poverty and bad parents and drug addiction and nobody commits a crime again. And I think some people commit crimes that have nothing to do with any of those factors. I think some people, for a lot of reasons, end up in a place where they are cruel and want to hurt people. And we have to be protected against from those people. And often that means putting them in prison and incarcerating them. And so I just think that we get so stuck. I think that some of the best work that comes from these situations and it’s not always good. A lot of this like the victim’s rights bill come from this, too. But I think when families of either perpetrators or victims or anywhere in between, when you go to the legislator I think that’s what’s hard, right? We’re pushing everything into the court system.

[00:43:08] To me, some of the most positive application is when people stop seeing it through the lens of their own individual experience and say, okay, but wait, something went wrong here that we can fix for everybody. Let’s do that. I want to do that. If I was the family member, if I was just an outraged community member about the loss of this family in San Francisco, I might start pushing for age limits on driver’s license and say like, okay, can we be done with this? Can we put an age limit on the driver’s license? Or you have to retake your test at a certain point. To me, the most positive application is when we stop using the courts, which we do in so many areas in American life. Instead of doing the hard, messy advocacy of changing laws, we go to the courts. And I think we’re running out of road with that. And I don’t just mean in the criminal justice system, I mean in lots of ways. Like I think saying, okay, but the law is a blunt instrument. Maybe we need a more precise law in this situation. And that’s where I’m going to put my hard work.

Beth [00:44:16] Well, I love what you offered up there, Sarah, because going to the legislature to advocate for-- and I like that solution-- at a certain age you start retesting every year or every two years for your license. That is a blunt instrument with a fine application, with an individualized application, right? If you pass the test, fantastic, keep driving, wonderful. No one’s rights are impeded. We’re just recognizing as a society that we want to be careful and we don’t want this to happen to you. You don’t want to kill four people in your car. No one wants to do that. It’s unfortunate that many times when we take our advocacy efforts to the legislature, the legislature still goes to the courts. The message that’s heard is write a harsher sentence into the laws when this happens, instead of asking how do we create conditions where this is less likely to happen? So we have a lot of people advocating right now for harsher punishments when there is revenge porn, when somebody creates an AI image. We need to think about, in addition to whatever punishment as a society we think is fair for people who do this, what are the conditions that create this and how can we improve those conditions? How can we change the way this happens in the first place instead of always pushing it to the back end?

Sarah [00:45:39] Well, think about what we’re doing with school shootings. We’re just starting to put the parents in prison. Like, instead of any measurable gun reform or gun control, we’ve just decided we’re going to punish the parents. If the kid is still alive, we’ll charge them as an adult, and if they’re not, we’ll just throw the parents in jail for being negligent of the way they store their weapons. Instead of saying, oh, I don’t know, to the legislator, we want actual gun safety laws around the storage. I mean, that’s wild to me. You’re talking about you’re going to throw him in prison for not storing his weapon properly, but fight laws that require everyone to store their weapon properly? Like, what is happening? What is happening? We are trying to do one-offs instead of saying what’s here. And that’s why everybody’s so jacked up about the AI porn is because we’re all freaked out about it. We all know there needs to be more regulation, not just about AI porn, but AI everything. And so, we’re taking it out on these circumstances, which are heinous, but are still like throw the book at these two 14 year olds. It’s not going to protect your daughter. Like what are we doing?

Beth [00:46:46] I wish that we could think early and often together about how you create that sense of relational accountability. And I don’t mean that in a woo-woo way. You can tell though when a person has a sense of accountability without being punished. We just had a conversation in my house about prank calling. One of my kids tells me gleefully about doing some prank calling. It was so fun. And I said, excuse me, what did you do? And she describes it and I said I’m not mad at you and you’re not in trouble, do not ever do that again. Let’s talk about why. Let’s talk about how prank calling is stealing someone’s time while they’re at work and harassment and how you don’t do anything anonymous anymore. And we had a conversation about it. I did not need to punish because there was accountability. She understood what I was saying. She handled it with maturity and I believe she won’t do it again. There are years and years of conversations like that beneath that ability to have accountability without punishment. I don’t know how you replicate that in every family and I don’t know how you replicate it at the societal level but that’s the question that I want to be asking. Especially when I think about a situation like this driver in California. How do you have some kind of societal level of accountability that assures a victim’s family that punishment is not our only tool here? Punishment is not the only way that we say this loss mattered to us and was unacceptable to all of us and we all grieve it with you, and we want to do our best to support you as you process this horror. I think that if we can turn our attention toward that, we’ve put an awful lot of energy into figuring out how to punish people as harshly as possible. If we turn a fraction of that energy toward that question, I think we can make progress.

Sarah [00:48:48] We look forward to hearing all of your insights on this, having a conversation in the comments over on Substack. We are going to turn to a more woo-woo question in the theme of accountability and punishment and transparency and pick up Kevin’s question Outside of Politics. Do we believe in karma? Beth, we are legally required to at least sing a few bars of Taylor Swift’s. Karma is my boyfriend. I mean, you got to. How are you going to talk about karma and not talk about that song? So Beth, do you believe in karma?

Beth [00:49:28] I don’t think so. I want to say that I do.

Sarah [00:49:29] How could you after 10 years of Donald Trump.

Beth [00:49:32] Something in me badly wants to say I believe in karma strongly. Maybe it is because I like that song. Maybe because it feels right and more just. Maybe there’s a piece of me that religiously feels like I should say yes, like not karma in in the-- maybe there’s a piece of me that feels religiously like I should say, yes, like if there is a God, there has to be that kind of justice where the ledger is balanced by the end of a life. But I don’t think so. I think we have really different capacities within us for accountability. I think there are people who’ve done very little harm in this life who punish themselves relentlessly. And people who have done a tremendous amount of harm who can’t even comprehend that. And so it just makes me feel like, no, I don’t think it evens out as neatly as we’d like it to.

Sarah [00:50:27] Well, I will say I’ve experienced what I would describe as karma. Actually, somewhat recently I had a person who was supremely shitty to me during my time as a commissioner have some karma come their way. I had another set of people who were shitty to my family at one point and they had some shitty stuff happen to them. And I’m not even going to lie to you that I didn’t walk around singing that song for a couple of days. But I don’t know if I feel like that’s like some grand scale balancing out. I just think that it’s not surprising. The shitty ways they treated me, they kept doing to other people until it finally caught up with them. Like I do feel like in most circumstances, when you act like a dick, it catches up with you eventually. Not always in the way I would hope. This was the pep talk I gave myself when Donald Trump came on the political scene and particularly when he won in 2016. I want Donald Trump to sit in a jail cell and grieve the selfish ways he’s acted and what it has cost the American people. I’m going to give myself a little pep-talk, like that’s never happening. What I want as the grand karmic payoff for him in particular ain’t ever coming. And I just had to let that go. I wanted him to feel bad, he ain’t never going to feel bad. Okay.

Beth [00:51:49] You want accountability.

Sarah [00:51:51] Yeah, I want accountability. But I won’t lie and say like sometimes I won’t take some karma. And I think there is good karma too. I think sometimes people who act right get rewarded not near as often as I’d like as an Enneagram one. I think I like karma as an addition to this conversation because I think it opens up the idea that it’ll come and maybe not in the way that you wanted it to, but it’ll come some way. It doesn’t have to be with a prison sentence. It doesn’t have to be through the court system. The universe is big and the consequences of your actions can play out in all manner of ways.

Beth [00:52:45] I agree with that. I definitely think that there are both positive and negative consequences and externalities to what we do. I definitely thing Schadenfreude is real, where you see something happen to the person who was shitty to you and it feels good. That’s very, very real. Can I tell you a quick story from the season of Survivor, though, about how I think that holding onto karma can hurt us?

Sarah [00:53:13] Well, are you talking about karma or are you just calling a grudge?

Beth [00:53:15] Well, I think you’ll see what you think. I’ll tell you the story and you see what you think.

Sarah [00:53:20] Okay.

Beth [00:53:20] So one of my favorite Survivor players of all time, Charlie, comes back for season 50. Charlie loves Taylor Swift. He’d be delighted, I think, that we’re connecting these pieces together. I love Charlie as a player. He decided to play the game as a pretty young man with an older woman named Maria, and they were a great duo. And they get to the end of the game, and Maria voted for Charlie’s opponent at the last tribal council to win the game. And that was the vote that cost him the game. So his number one ally, from his perspective, stabs him in the back at the very end, robs him of a million dollars.. And I’m sure it was just humiliating. I can’t imagine how awful that would have felt. So he comes back to play again on season 50, and he is carrying that with such heaviness that he meets another player who he hasn’t seen yet. So season 49 wrapped and they immediately started filming 50. So this player from 49, Rizzo, is telling Charlie about his game and how he didn’t ultimately vote for his number one ally to win the million dollars. And Charlie is just like enraged. And I’m sure some of this is the edit, but I felt watching this like Charlie is a person who is waiting for karma to happen. And he is inflicting this sadness and anger that he’s holding on himself more than anyone else. I just hate for him when he watches this back. I hate how this is going to feel to him. And so I guess there’s a part of me that tries to let the idea of karma go and maybe this is just a slightly different way of saying the same thing that you said. If I am waiting to see it, it will consume me. If I can just say I don’t know how it evens out, and it may not, and life just isn’t fair, and I just let it all go, that’s better for my heart.

Sarah [00:55:35] Yeah, no, I definitely think that’s just holding a grudge and being petty. I think that that’s bad for you. And I think karma the implication is like that you do trust that it’ll come back around. You’re not depending on it. You’re not like staking on your claims on it. There’s a little bit trust in the universe that like it’ll back eventually. Like that’s how things work. And I don’t have to worry about it and I don’t have to make it happen.

Beth [00:55:56] In this life or another.

Sarah [00:55:57] In this life or another, like the consequences will pay off. And I’m not a grudge holder, despite what you might have concluded from my previous recitation of the people who wronged me and the wrongs they had coming to them. You know I hadn’t thought about that guy in years. And then he had a coming around, I was like, see, I trusted the universe that he would be a dick and it would come back to him and it did. And so like, to me, I think that sort of karma is different. Like trusting karma and being petty to me are very, very different. Because I do think you can get wrapped up into it. And I think to me that’s like an obstacle to the flow of karma. Like you’re disrupting it. You’re trying to insert yourself in the process instead of just trusting the universe and trusting like that things play out the way they’re supposed to play out. And sometimes it’s fair in the moment and doesn’t feel that way. And sometimes you look back 20 years and you thank God for unanswered prayers and you’re like, man, karma knew what it was doing. You know what I mean? So I think to me it’s like a trust of the energetic flow of bad energy and good energy and not trying to insert yourself in the process too much.

Beth [00:57:00] Hmm, I like that. I think my other obstacle with karma is how much I try to wire myself for grace and that it’s not that I want people to get what they deserve, it’s that I them to get better than they deserve. And I personally hope I get better than I deserve and I hope I give better than people deserve around me. And so that is like a little bit of a record scratch in my brain when I think about karma too. How do I reconcile the notion of karma with the notion of grace?

Sarah [00:57:27] Some people deserve, oh-so-very-little, Beth. And even if they get some grace, it’s still pretty bad.

Beth [00:57:35] Still pretty bad? Okay, all right, you solved it. Fine, that works.

Sarah [00:57:39] Some people deserve oh-so-very-little. Some people are indebted. You know what I’m saying? Like, they got a big debt to pay off. You know I’m saying? Like they’re starting from negative 200 million is what I am saying. Well, we can’t wait to hear all of your takes on Karma and Grace. Thank you so much for being here with us today. We will be back in your ears again on Friday with another episode. And until then, keep it nuanced y’all.

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

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