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18 April 2003: "'Only' 18 years"

Jackie D linked to some commentary by Mickey Kaus (whoever that is) on Slate (scroll down to "Insanity defense") regarding the "lenient" sentence handed down to Volkert van der Graaf; 18 years for the murder of Pim Fortuyn.

For starters, the title "Insanity defense" makes no sense; a psychiatric evaluation entered into evidence during the trial found that Van der Graaf was not insane. But Kaus' description of the sentence as "ludicrous" and "Euromoronic"... well, let's just say a brief fisking is in order.

The Dutch penal system focuses primarily on rehabilitation rather than retribution; the resulting attitude is that there's little point in handing down a sentence which is significantly longer than the time required to rehabilitate the convicted felon. As a result, Dutch sentencing, especially where homicide is concerned, can indeed seem lenient. But is it really "ludicrous," let alone "Euromoronic," as Kaus asserts?

According to the US DOJ's Bureau of Justice Statistics the homicide rate for 2000 (the most recent figure) for the entire United States was estimated at 6.1/100,000 inhabitants, which was incidentally the lowest it's been since 1966. The FBI estimated the figure at 5.5/100,000. According to the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, the homicide rate in the Netherlands was 0.014/1,000 (i.e. 1.4/100,000 - less than a third of the American rate) in 2001, dropping to 0.011/1,000 in 2002 (Note that the Dutch government's Central Bureau for Statistics includes in its own homicide figures all actual and all attempted homicides, a factor not always taken into consideration). In the face of these figures, the assertion that more lenient sentencing leads to more murders seems to have no basis in reality.

This meshes well with the theory that heavier sentencing does not act as a deterrent to crime as much as the prospective perpetrator's estimate of his chances of being caught. Few people commit a crime if they think they won't get away it. This is, of course, not necessarily a consideration for political assassins like Van der Graaf; in the cost-benefit analysis of the prospective assassin, the benefit of creating history outweighs the cost of punishment, whatever that punishment may be. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that the prospect of a heavy sentence will have a deterrent effect on such a person. The execution of Charles Guiteau for the murder of President James Garfield evidently did nothing to dissuade Leon Czolgosz from assassinating President William McKinley two decades later, nor did Gzolgosz' death by electric chair put a halt to political assassination in America.

Of course, in the case of the Netherlands, the last political assassination was that of William "the Silent" of Orange, first Steward of the Republic, in 1584^*. The man who murdered him, Balthasar Gerards, was executed, and one might argue that this had such a deterrent effect, it lasted for over 400 years. But if this is the case, one can only wonder why political assassinations did not resume when the Netherlands abolished execution by slow torture (in Gerards' case, it lasted three days) or, failing that, when the death penalty in peacetime was abolished in 1870 (the death penalty could still be handed down by military tribunals in wartime until, this too, was abolished as of 01-Jan-1991).

Thus, I fail to see how the sentence handed down to Volkert van der Graaf will make any difference to prospective assassins; either such an assassin thinks he'll get away with it, or he doesn't care at all. In either case, the severity of the sentence will not have a deterrent effect.

And so to Van der Graaf himself. He received 18 years, though with good behaviour, he could be released on parole in twelve; since time spent in pre-trial custody is subtracted from the sentence he could indeed be out in eleven years from now. Maybe I'm being a bleeding-heat "Euromoron," but being deprived of your freedom, even in the relative comfort of a Dutch prison, for eleven years does not exactly strike me as a mild inconvenience. Think about it: eleven years of not being able to decide when to get up, when to eat, where to go. I'm 32, a year younger than Van der Graaf; if I were to be spend the next eleven years in incarceration, I'd be 43 by the time I got out; not an easy point to pick up your life all over again. Besides which, it's not a given that Van der Graaf will be out in eleven years. He's already shown himself to be a troublesome inmate (going on hunger strike to protest being put on "suicide watch"), so he might not get the time off for good behaviour.

But the crime, you say? Fortuyn was a political candidate, he might have become prime minister. Nou en? ("So what?") What if Van der Graaf had murdered a total nobody, who happened to be a widowed mother of three children? Would that have been a less heinous crime?

I know you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but Pim Fortuyn's assassination, especially at that juncture, was probably the best thing that could have happened to his political career (albeit not to himself). It's like Tupac Shakur; that guy sold more records after he was killed than he ever would have if he hadn't been waxed.
The only thing Fortuyn really had going for him as a politician, apart from being flamboyant and populist, was that he wasn't part of the political establishment (not that he hadn't previously tried to be, via the conventional route of being active in an established political party), and that he challenged the establishment on a number of valid points. The problem was that I don't think he had a clue what he would have done if his challenge had borne fruit, and he had become prime minister; his whole platform was about being against, and what he was supposedly for was rubbish. (For example, he advocated abolishing the army and the air force, but he also advocated reintroducing national service. I mean, what? The Dutch navy doesn't need that many people.)

His assassination didn't change history. Without Fortuyn, the LPF crashed and burned within three months (or, more precisely, it cought fire almost immediately but took three months to hit the ground). With Fortuyn, it would have lasted maybe three years. Certainly, Fortuyn destroyed a couple of taboos that needed destroying, and shook the political establishment out of its complacency, but he managed that without ever taking office. One of the taboos he challenged was that certain things should not be said because they're not "politically correct."

So it is entirely in the spirit of Fortuyn's legacy that I say it's probably for the best that he died before he, and his posse of rank amateurs, could do any real damage. I still think Van de Graaf deserves to be locked away, albeit mainly for grossly overestimating his own importance. The main thing he deserves is to have been forgotten by 2014.

"Volkert who?" I've forgotten him already.

* - Admittedly, providing one disregards World War II. In 1943, Dutch resistance groups assassinated a number of prominent collaborators, mainly members of the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging ("National-Socialist Movement," the Dutch fascist party). Anton Mussert, the leader of the NSB, objected to the idea of reprisal executions, and so the Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer for the Netherlands (a German named Hanns Rauter) and the head of the Dutch SS (a Dutchman and extreme NSB-member named Henk Feldmeijer) organised Aktion "Silbertanne" (Operation "Silver Pine"). In the operation, Feldmeijer would recruit small teams of assassins from Dutch SS members, particularly veterans of the Eastern Front, who would carry out covert reprisal killings; for every murdered "national-socialist person," three prominent persons in the region who were known to be anti-German would be killed by way of reprisal. The hit squad, which was named Sonderkommando Feldmeijer ("special purpose command Feldmeijer"), had a maximum of fifteen members at any given time. Due to the extrajudicial nature of these killings (Sonderkommando Feldmeijer carried out at least 54), they may be classed as political murders, as may the assassinations by the resistance. However, the victims were rarely as prominent as William of Orange or Pim Fortuyn.

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