The five members of the Makah tribe who participated in an unsanctioned hunt of a gray whale last year were sentenced earlier this week. The Makah tribe, whose reservation is located in northwestern Washington state, is the only tribe in the country with treaty rights to hunt whales. However, the long, arduous process of obtaining a waiver to actually conduct a legal hunt has fueled the profound frustration of some tribe members; the Makah's last legal hunt was in 1999. The five whalers who conducted their own whale hunt last September said it was anger over the long waiver process that drove them to do it. In March, three of the whalers pleaded guilty to illegal whaling and this week received lighter sentences than the two tribe members who went to trial. The whalers who pleaded guilty were sentenced to two years of probation and over 100 hours of community service each. As for the two who went to trial, one of the whalers was sentenced to 90 days in prison and the other, who the judge saw as remorseless, received the harshest sentence of five months in federal prison.
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caniscandida Posted 5:31 am
01 Jul 2008
Judge Arnold sounds like someone I would love to meet. From the Seattle Times article:
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The judge made his displeasure plain from the bench, stating that while Sherman Alexie is his favorite author and his interest in tribal matters intense -- he referenced a personal library full of books about Indian affairs -- he could not sympathize with what the whalers had done.
"They decided to take the law into their own hands. They defied their own community and the laws of this country, which they well knew."
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Are the sentences too light?, as many in the animal welfare community seem to think. From what I can tell, I think they are not. The two defendants who got prison time are reported to have been shocked as their sentences were read, especially the one who got five months, after the prosecutors had asked for only 60 days; so already they have begun to learn a lesson -- whatever the lesson might be.
In general, when it comes to imprisonment, our justice system is horribly unsatisfactory. Besides the fact that too many people are sentenced to prison for non-violent crimes, and besides the fact that a disproportionate number of them are poor people of color, the whole concept of imprisonment-as-punishment is seriously ethically flawed. Whenever a society deems it suitable to sequester one of its members, the purpose should NOT be punishment (nor should it be "rehabilitation," an unfortunate and misleading term); it should be assisting the positive moral evolution of the prisoner.
These two whalers will be unlike most other imprisoned convicts in many ways. Their experiences, values, and sense of self set them apart from mainstream Euro-American society. There is no telling how they will react to their imprisonment; and it is not easy to predict that at the ends of their terms, they will emerge from prison better people. The supervised probation, for all five of the whalers, if it is done consistently and thoughtfully, would seem to be a more promising way to go.
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