Seeking to explain, though not to justify

Star Tribune
April 11, 2002
Mitchell B. Pearlstein

One need not equate what Andrea Yates was convicted of in Texas in March with what Roland Amundson pleaded guilty to in Minneapolis last week in order to agree that each committed crimes not a whit short of crazy. How else to describe Yates drowning her five young children? How else to explain Amundson -- an affluent and heretofore respected judge on Minnesota's second highest bench -- stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from a vulnerable adult he had sworn to protect?

"Crazy" may not be a clinically correct or respectful term of art, even when used only to describe a person's behavior, not his or her character. Yet is anyone willing to claim that mental illness of some sort was not a factor in both cases, including Amundson's?

It's much easier, of course, to argue that Yates is ill (as opposed to simply evil or bad), as reams of information about exactly how sick she is have emerged since she was arrested 10 months ago. But what about Amundson? No one contends that the former Appeals Court judge is psychotic or delusional, as Yates clearly is. Yes, his lawyer has said he has suffered from depression for a number of years. But few people, if any, are inclined to view depression, even the darkest kind, as an adequate explanation for what he did.

Nor should they. But neither should they -- nor should the justice system itself -- be oblivious to the fact that the only rational explanation for what Amundson did is almost surely rooted in something more complicated than perfidy.

This is not to suggest that Amundson was bereft of a conscious and free will every time he wrote or cashed a stolen check. It's not to claim that people, as a rule, don't know what they're doing when they hurt others. People who commit crimes must be held accountable. To be clear, Amundson must be held accountable.

At the same time this episode has made another point clear.

When taken in awkward tandem with the Yates case, Amundson's troubles make more direct and tangible the connection between many acts of criminality on the one hand and various forms and degrees of mental illness on the frequent other. It throws into starker relief the unremarkable fact that people who are damaged and hurting are more likely to do destructive and self-destructive things than those who have escaped harsh afflictions and assaults of one kind or another.

I recall a panel discussion in Washington several years ago in which most participants and audience members took a particularly hard line against crime and criminals. Their views were more sober than vengeful, but the most impressive comments were by a lone speaker who bravely argued that some people do terrible things, at least in part, because terrible things have come to torment their own minds and souls. At no time did he contend that such people shouldn't be held accountable or that society shouldn't be protected. What he did do was spotlight the enormous sadness that comes with the often legitimate and necessary need to further punish those already scarred by life's short sticks: miseries such as fetal alcohol syndrome, and physical and sexual abuse.

What the speaker also could have said (and perhaps he did) was there, but for the grace of God, go you and I.

A key distinction in discussions like this -- lest they deteriorate into excuse-making -- is the difference between explaining and justifying. Understanding a train of causes is not the same as making light of wreckage or exonerating perpetrators. It's not a shuffle in which victims are lost and victimized yet again. To repeat and underline, all people must be held accountable and innocents must be protected.

As readers may have surmised by now, Rollie Amundson is a friend. As correctly reported in the press over the last few months, he has many friends in town -- including my wife, who adores him, and who, like the others, grieves for all who are gasping in the wake of his actions. That list includes not only the woman he stole from and her family, but his four adopted children, all very young, who have not been in this country long.

I don't argue with the tough line taken by the Hennepin County attorney in the case. That's what prosecutors are supposed to do. That's what law and order demand. There's no argument that Amundson must pay a steeper price still.

But cases like these, I also would claim, should rest on mercy, with punishment grounded in the confidence that what Amundson did was a wild swing out of character and practice rather than any fair or plausible reflection of them.

If there's a saving grace to be ferreted anywhere in this hideous mess, it's that reasons have grown more immediate and personal for thinking seriously and openly about mental illness. Reasons also have grown more compelling for considering how to judiciously mete out punishment when hard-to-imagine people commit impossible-to-fathom crimes.

-- Mitchell B. Pearlstein is president of Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis.