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CSUDH Habermas UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: May 13, 2001
Latest update: May 13, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

Terror Twins Cool Their Jets in an Alaskan Jail Brawl: Thrown off a plane for fighting, sisters await trial on federal charges in Anchorage. Judge is afraid to let them fly home. Sunday, May 13, 2001 By Kim Murphy, Times Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times, p. A12.

"What's the evidence that these two people would do what anyone else told them to do?" argued Assistant U.S. Atty. Charlie Brown, who is prosecuting the case. "Their basic attitude was: 'We'll do what we damn well want to'--a complete unwillingness to respond to any kind of authority." So the judge won't permit them to be released on bail unless both parents fly with them from their home in Michigan when they must appear in Anchorage for a federal trial for interfering with the crew of an aircraft, which detoured 1100 miles to Anchorage to put the young women, 22, off the plane.

After frightening an attendant who believed one of the twins was trying to open a door mid-flight, "[w]hen another flight attendant approached, Cynthia struck him in the face and swung and spit at other flight attendants, according to the affidavits. The pilot returned to try to handcuff Cynthia's wrists and ankles, at which time Crystal allegedly jumped on the back of one of the flight attendants and applied a chokehold."

The penalty for interference with the performance of the duties of a flight crew can be twenty years. This is not typically the kind of charge filed against young women. At 22, and with the wherewithal to fly to Shanghai for a modeling contest, this would seem to be unlikely behavior. The fight on board the plane erupted between the two sisters after the movie. The crew reported that they were drinking and that one of the sisters announced that she had to get out of the plane to have a cigarette. That's a little hard to do, when you're 1000 miles out over the ocean.

Discussion Questions

1. To what extent do you consider that the young women involved bear responsibility for their behavior? What theoretical approaches would you want to consider?
   jeanne's notes on one plausible answer:

   First, I would consider "agency." There is some implication that the young women were inebriated. In the past that has been considered a diminished capacity defense, but in today's world one is considered responsible for the drinking. Inebriation may remove the "specific intent" needed to establish a violent crime, and may be considered by some states as mitigating.

   But I see more here in terms of "agency." The fighting of the two young women amongst themselves, the pejorative name-calling of each other, and the physical attacks on the crew members who tried to restrain them, suggest a commitment to violence of the kind Lonnie Athens describes in Why They Kill. A chokehold is violent, and would seem to show some experience with violent behavior. The statement "We'll do what we damn well want to," seems to be a declaration such as might accompany a violent resolution.

   It sounds to me from the bare facts reported in the news article, like these young women have experienced at least some of the violentization process.

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2. Athens believes that violent actors should be held responsible for their actions, for he believes that the descision to embark on a violent career is made rationally. Moreover, Athens believes that once one has completed the entire violentization process, it is no longer reversible. What do you think this might indicate for these two young women?
   jeanne's notes on one plausible answer:

   Well, first, we're talking about two different kinds of agency here. Athens is focussed on the violent criminal, and on describing the process in violentization. If we take a constitutive criminology approach, we are going to favor understanding the role of the social system in the violentization process, and there is a huge role. All those children who are violently subjugated are abandoned by a social system that could prevent that process. That would mean that at the early stages of violentization, the process itself could have been altered, and that is one of the alternatives I believe constitutive criminology would have take. At a later stage in the process, the process may in fact be unalterable. That is certainly research we need to pursue.

   Athens' primary concern in studying the violentization process was to understand it, not to experiment with it and alter it. So agency for Athens meant the rational decision-making that went on in the subject's relationship to violent others, and then to others more generally. But we must be concerned about a much broader agency. The agency to alter behavior patterns, the agency to rethink earlier decisions that might have been more responsive to the structural context than to options in a less violent setting. So yes, it makes sense that the perpetrator of violent crime is making decisions that can make sense to us. But it also makes sense that the perpetrator who has been through the violentization process had a very limited set of options in the early stages of the process.

   Athens' process of seeing violence as a logical procession of decisions to behave in a given violent pattern need prevent our discovering constitutive principles that may undo some of those processes, especially with the young. This is what we see in the Lionel Tate Case, and in this case of two 22 year old women. Can we not find better ways to rebuild this process instead of just accepting that "that's the way it is?"

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3. If you were pleading this case in social justice, or in a court of law, what information would you want?
   jeanne's notes on one plausible answer:

   I would want a complete childhood history, for I would want to see if the process of violentization could be established, and if I could establish that the young women had not completed that process. I would also want experts on constitutive criminology to work with me on a plan for working to reverse this process during any sentence imposed. Of course, that's because I believe in rehabilitation, as do critical theorists and postmodernists.

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