Many astute writers about criminal justice pride themselves on analysis of data. This is fine (as long as the data aren't intentionally skewed to omit inconvenient facts). Numbers can tell us a lot -- for example, that shootings of police officers are markedly up this year, that murder is spiking in dozens of cities, and that heroin trafficking and related overdose deaths have reached epidemic levels.
The other side of the coin is that "data," even when considered honestly, can be used to create a miles-deep fog of what academics tell us is a "nuanced" and "careful" analysis. Such analysis, we are lectured, is in contrast to the screeching of wahoos, cowboys and assorted brickheads who, in their Trailer Park way, have become alarmed about crime and think that punishment and incapacitation are warranted.
Every now and again, it's useful to clear away the academic fog to recall what it's being used to obscure. This is one such story, taken not from the annals of death penalty arguments, buy merely from the inner section of yesterday's Washington Post. The whole mind-bending article about a random savage murder is a revelation, but this is the paragraph that caught my eye (emphasis added):
[P]olice called to the scene discovered William Bennett's body, but [defendants] Roberts and Bowman had moved Cynthia Bennett, then 55, behind a fence and she lay unconscious for 45 minutes before she was spotted. Howard David Reines, a trauma surgeon at Inova Fairfax Hospital, testified in 2011 that Cynthia Bennett suffered cuts and broken bones in her face and around her eyes, one ear was partially torn off, she had a severe injury to her pelvic area and she lost more than five quarts of blood through the wound in her lower body before doctors could halt the bleeding. "In 30 years, I don't think I've ever quite seen anything like it," he said.
This is the kind of stuff crime victims live with. Good luck finding a word about it on SSRN.
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