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 his week, the case
for capital punishment has a local habitation and a name. The habitation
is "an undisclosed location in Camden, N.J." and the name
is Thomas Trantino. Here's the story.
In the pre-dawn
hours of August 26th 1963, two officers on the force of Lodi, N.J.
responded to a report of a disturbance at the Angel Lounge on Route
46 in that town. The officers were Sergeant Peter Voto, aged 40,
and Patrolman Gary Tedesco, 22. Tedesco, a probationer, was unarmed,
so Sgt. Voto went into the bar alone. When, after a while, he hadn't
come out, Tedesco went in himself. Inside the bar were two career
crooks, Thomas Trantino and Frank Falco, celebrating a recent crime
spree. They had grabbed and disarmed Voto after he entered the bar;
now they held Tedesco, too. The two police officers were forced
to strip to their underwear, taunted and pistol-whipped, then shot
in the head. The murderers then fled. Among the police officers
who later arrived at the crime scene was Chief Andrew Voto, who
slipped in a pool of his brother's blood.
Falco was killed
a few days later in a shoot-out with police. Trantino gave himself
up, was tried, and sentenced to death. The state Supreme Court affirmed
the conviction and sentence in 1965. However, while the inevitable
appeals were dragging their weary length through the system, that
same court determined that New Jersey's death penalty was unconstitutional,
so Trantino's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. That was
in 1972. Two years later, Trantino published a book, Lock the
Lock, of autobiographical ramblings (for a brief sample, see
this).
The book's publication naturally caused much distress to the families
of the two murdered officers. There is no evidence Trantino lost
any sleep over this. He accepted his royalty payments without audible
protest.
Being now under
a mere life sentence, Trantino was eligible for parole. He duly
applied — the first time, in 1979. At the third hearing, in
1982, Trantino got himself a new attorney, a crusading young radical
lawyer named Roger
Lowenstein. Lowenstein discovered that Trantino, far from being
a cynical and manipulative psychopath, was in fact gentle, wise,
selfless, and intellectual — a sort of reincarnation of Albert
Schweitzer. Lowenstein became determined to win release on parole
for this living saint, and one year ago he finally succeeded.
Trantino's
ninth parole hearing had been denied in June 1999 primarily on five
grounds:
[H]is psychological
profile, as reflected in the testimony of the Board's chief psychologist,
of a borderline personality disorder that made him potentially
violent; the lack of a suitable parole plan; a failure to address
in psychological counseling the issues that led him to engage
in domestic violence; a history of being less than candid with
the Board and psychologists about his past; and his plans to write
another book.
This denial
was appealed all the way up to the state supreme court, who on January
18th 2001 issued a ruling
. They found that parole had been denied unfairly, and ordered Trantino
released for one year to a "half-way house," i.e. a lightly
supervised hostel. After the year — which brings us to the
present day — he was to be released altogether, his only further
obligation to society being to report to a parole officer once in
a while. That final release has now been effected.
The supreme
court ruling, though lengthy, is worth looking at. It contains,
in its appendices, some partial transcripts from the 1999 hearing,
exchanges between Trantino and the Parole Board at which Trantino...
Well, read them for yourself; suffice it to say they do not lend
a whole lot of support to the Albert Schweitzer theory. Trantino's
basic position is that he's really, really sorry he did something
or other to some guys — though (this, at any rate, is what
he says when he remembers to keep his story straight) he can't actually
recollect anything that happened owing to his having been drunk
and high and possibly in the grip of some psychiatric disturbance
at the time — and could he please go home now?
That ruling
also shows that the state supreme court's ruling was not unreasonable
on a strict reading of the law. There's no evidence that anyone
in either of the appeals courts was happy about letting this killer
loose. The parole board, however, was so unhappy about the
prospect they pulled out all the stops they could reach to keep
Trantino inside. Did they step over some legal line thereby? The
supreme court believes they did, and I'm not sure they're wrong.
Here you see at work the ruling principle of modern liberal jurisprudence:
fiat justitia, ruat coelum — "Let justice be done,
and let the heavens fall." Are we releasing a dangerous psychopath
to come and live among honest citizens? Sorry, the law says we have
to. (The law, by the way, has since been changed. Partly as a result
of the Trantino case, since 1997 a cop-killer in New Jersey forfeits
all parole rights. Laws cannot be applied retroactively, of course,
so Trantino's parole comes under the previous statutes.)
There is a
good deal to argue about here. The fiat justitia principle,
for example, actually has a great deal to be said in its favor,
from a conservative viewpoint: abstract principles of law, inflexibly
applied, may indeed offer the best basis for a well-ordered society
— so long as the laws are based in reason, good sense and the
true invariants of human nature. Other things, too: Does a geriatric
in orange fatigues shuffling around a prison yard eventually become
pitiable? (Trantino is only 63, in bouncing good health, and has
plans to work and to write more books. Voto and Tedesco? They're
still dead.) And: Is there any force in the land great enough to
stop the apparently irresistible tendency of judges, lead-swinging
prison officers' unions, and crusading lefty lawyers to spring criminals
from jail before they've served their time? And: What the heck is
parole all about, anyway? What kind of dumb idea is it? If a criminal
is sentenced to 10 years, why on earth should he not serve precisely
ten years? (Time off for good behavior? How about time added
on for bad behavior?!)
You can argue
the death penalty in general terms, too. Is it unfair to blacks?
To poor people? Are there cases of innocent people being executed?
However, none of those arguments applies to Trantino, who is emphatically
un-black, un-poor and un-innocent. There is no doubt at all that
he did this appalling crime, and not even his delusional attorney
tries to deny it.
There is one
thing, however, that you can't argue about. You can't argue about
the following: If this piece of offal, Trantino, had been fried
good and slow 40 years ago, as he so richly deserved, the state
supreme Court of New Jersey would not have been put to the trouble
of issuing a 40,000-word opinion, Roger Lowenstein would have had
to find some other psycho to sing "Kumbaya" to, the publishing
firm of Random House would have one less piece of unreadable gibberish
on its lists (not that that would notice), the taxpayers
of New Jersey would have been saved untold millions of dollars,
and we would not now be insulted by newspaper pictures showing the
sneering face of a murderer who has successfully gamed the system.
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