Of Love and Other Demons - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

After reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and falling in love with it, I have really, really tried to feel similarly amorous towards Marquez's other works. However, nothing has quite grabbed me. Of Love and Other Demons is certainly a good book, and I think I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't had such high expectations for it.

Of Love and Other Demons is a small book about Sierva Maria, a girl who is variously believed to be a saint, rabid, and possessed by a demon. She is sent to a convent to be exorcised, but instead becomes the obsessive love interest of the priest sent to perform her exorcism. However, despite being the ostensible focus of the story, Sierva Maria never becomes a real character--rather Marquez seems to have created her as something of a human ink blot that the various adults around her only comprehend in light of their own prejudices. Disappointingly, the reader never gains any insight into her state of mind, and as a result, Delaura's passion for her comes off as rather incomprehensible and unaffecting. Perhaps some of the book's flatness stems as well from Edith Grossman's translation--that the prose doesn't seem to zing in quite the fashion of One Hundred Years of Solitude could say more about her skills relative to Gregory Rabassa than about the relative merits of the two books as Marquez wrote them.

(Via Sara Butler) Joe Carter thinks the Terry Schiavo mess would be cleaned up if we only took a dim view of no-fault divorce and reinstituted common-law marriage. (Assuming arguendo that Mrs. Schiavo is alive, that would render Mr. Schiavo unfit and a bigamist, says Carter).

Actually, the reinstitution of common-law marriage and elimination of no-fault divorce would be catastrophic for people in vegetative states with allegedly disloyal spouses. Now the incentive would become much stronger to get the plug pulled as early as possible (maybe even before the VS was a permanent one), since one would no longer be capable of divorcing one's wife and remarrying, or of carrying on romantic attachments with other people. Mr. Schiavo, of course, is fighting to withdraw care nonetheless but one shouldn't ignore the effect this proposal would have on future cases.

(Via Eugene Volokh) Adrian Vermeule and Cass Sunstein team up to champion the death penalty on pro-life grounds and the Crooked Timber commenters begin frothing at the mouth. The Vermeule/Sunstein argument is roughly that it is immoral to let a dozen innocent people die a statistical homicidal death rather than kill a guilty one. Even if one supposes the death penalty to be of imperfect accuracy, they point out, the tradeoff is still serious, since most homicide victims are innocent too. [Some criticism in the Crooked Timber comments seems to be aghast that Sunstein and Vermeule are unabashed consequentialists. Well, yes, they are.]

Myself, I am skeptical of the paper's empirical assumption-- that our death penalty system "deters" people from committing capital crime. Out of the several thousand people who commit homicides, only a fraction are legally eligible for the death penalty. Only a fraction of those are caught and charged with it. Only a small fraction of those are convicted, and only a fraction of those are ever actually executed, rather than kept on death row until they die. I will dredge out these numbers again, which I learned in Steven Levitt's Economics of Crime class at Chicago.

The very small probability that somebody who commits a capital crime will ever receive a capital punishment, and the fact that our current death penalty involves only marginally more punishment than our current prison system, makes me skeptical that a rational criminal will be deterred. That said, I take it that one could hypothesize a pseudo-rational criminal, who pays attention to the harshest sentence he could receive rather than the sentence he is likely to receive, and is therefore scared off of committing capital crimes in death-penalty states even though he would be a lunatic to think his chance of being executed is very high. Indeed, Sunstein has done some work in this vein before, and if Sunstein and Vermeule would cross the midway and get Richard Thaler to sign onto their paper too, I suspect the three of them could craft a fascinating paper about quasi-rational deterrence.

Alternatively, one could suppose either that the condition of being on death row or being put in fear of one's life is so bad that it alone might deter people from committing capital crimes in death-penalty jurisdictions. Possible, although since capital defendants who plead not-guilty also get super-duper-due-process and can often find better lawyers willing to represent them for free, this would be a tough call for the rational criminal. But see supra. Also, I suppose, the presence of the death penalty might deter people from committing the most terrible crimes (e.g., blowing up federal buildings with many people inside) since in those cases the odds of a conviction and the imposition of the death penalty (and swift execution) are much greater.

[I do note that Sunstein and Vermeule confront this argument in their paper-- page 9 and footnote 30-- but only to suggest that theoretical arguments should give way to econometric suspicion, and that in any case we should err on the side of life. (Namely, the death penalty).]

Anyway, none of this is an argument that the death penalty could never deter-- I am pretty sure that it could, and if so the Sunstein/Vermeule argument has force-- just that I find it hard to believe that our current system of haphazardly executing a small subset of convicted murderers does the job.

UPDATE: Here is the argument I remember from Steven Levitt, Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s, 18 J. Econ. Perspectives 163, 175 (2004):

Largely lost in this debate, however, are two important facts (Katz, Levitt and Shustorovich, 2003). First, given the rarity with which executions are carried out in this country and the long delays in doing so, a rational criminal should not be deterred by the threat of execution. Despite increases in capital punishment in recent years, the likelihood of being executed conditional on committing murder is still less than 1 in 200. Even among those on death row, the annual execution rate is only 2 percent, or twice the death rate from accidents and violence among all American men. Among the subsample of individuals engaged in illegal activities, the death rates are likely to be much higher. Levitt and Venkatesh (2000) report a death rate of 7 percent annually for street-level drug sellers in the gang they analyze. Kennedy, Piehl and Braga (1996) estimate violent death rates to be 1–2 percent annually among all gang members in Boston. It is hard to believe the fear of execution would be a driving force in a rational criminal’s calculus in modern America.

Professor Charles Fried, in the New York Times (3/23/05):

In their intervention in the Terri Schiavo matter, Republicans in Congress and President Bush have, in a few brief legislative clauses, embraced the kind of free-floating judicial activism, disregard for orderly procedure and contempt for the integrity of state processes that they quite rightly have denounced and sought to discipline for decades.

May my hands fall off and my word processor crash if ever in this essay or anywhere else I use, other than in derision or refutation, the degraded epithet "judicial activism."