Equal punishment

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court spared millions of legal immigrants from the threat of deportation for a drunk driving accident.

Josue Leocal, a Haitian immigrant living in Miami, confessed to inflicting serious bodily injury on two people while driving under the influence in 2000. He was deported after serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence because U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services interpreted his drunk driving conviction as a "crime of violence" under the law.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Leocal on a technicality, deciding a felony DUI shows no "intent to cause harm," and thus is not a "crime of violence." Rather than quibbling over semantics, I'm more interested in why an immigrant who commits any felony, violent or nonviolent, should have so little to lose.

A legal alien is upgraded to citizenship status for virtue but not downgraded to deportee status for vice. According to the USCIS, a permanent resident is awarded naturalization for, among other requirements, taking the "oath of allegiance" and passing a comprehensive exam on romanticized U.S. history and government. Immigrants must demonstrate their bursting love for America by reciting obscure factoids most born citizens don't know. (OK smartypants, maybe you know who said, "Give me liberty or give me death," but Dennis Kucinich has greater name recognition than Patrick Henry these days.)

Why do we reward an immigrant's contrived American patriotism more zealously than we punish his destruction to American society, considering comparable treatment of citizens?

In Florida, as in most states, drunk driving that results in death or injury is a serious crime. While a first-time DUI is normally charged as a misdemeanor, many states will raise the charge to a felony if there is an injury from a drunk driving accident (and also if the crime in question is not the driver's first DUI).

If we assume that any crime worth prosecuting is a crime that has a victim — whether that victim is a specific person or a more dubious abstraction — sentencing is clearly meant to redress victims' damages, if only symbolically. A judicial sentence is forced atonement for secular sins — a metaphoric, microcosmic reflection of damage done to society. The punishment is symbolic in that even states that permit capital punishment do not execute every murderer.

Because judicial sentences are not an eye for an eye, the unit of penalty is somewhat arbitrary. In the United States, we prescribe punishments in various terms and amounts, sometimes monetary, sometimes chronological, always culturally specific. These units are dependent on what people in our society would suffer without; if transplanted to another culture, they wouldn't translate exactly, if at all.

In any society though, punishment for a crime is also intended to preemptively deter people from committing that crime. Since a population's values are clearly not uniform, an ideally constructed judicial system should assign comparative levels of deterrence to each person. Otherwise, the rich have fewer disincentives to misbehave. If Jean Valjean and Winona Ryder filch from the same bakery, I'd recommend greater leniency for Valjean, even though the loss is the same to the baker.

This is, naturally, part of the reason judges and juries have leeway in sentencing, to tailor the punishment to the crime and its circumstances.

The judicial system, then, must account for the gravity of a crime and the desiderata of the criminal, because a punishment isn't really a punishment unless it deprives the punished of something precious. And so for the gravest crimes, felonies, we enforce the most severe disincentives against committing them.

At the site of Leocal's DUI, Florida, as in many other states, convicted felons are usually disenfranchised for life. And, as any permanent resident studying for the Department of Justice's U.S. Citizenship test can reiterate from their official practice exams, the U.S. government considers the right to vote "the most important right granted to U.S. citizens."

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Therefore, by the government's own reckoning, a citizen convicted of a drunk-driving felony is treated with the most severe punishment possible. Is it right that citizens should have more to lose for the same crime?

If deportation is considered an immigrant's maximum loss, if residency to an immigrant is analogous to civil rights to a citizen, the judicial system has an opportunity to make drunk driving, or any other felony, equally repugnant to citizens and non-citizens alike. Catherine Rampell is a sophomore from Palm Beach, Fla. She can be reached at crampell@princeton.edu.