8/15/2008
Olga Franco was found guilty of 4 counts of vehicular homicide. The event that she’s guilty of was a van and bus collision near Cottonwood, MN that injured several students and killed four. She was driving the van. Many of the parents, relatives, and friends are relieved that Olga could be spending a long time in prison.
What should happen to people who accidentally cause car accidents? Why does our society hand down the sentences it does—justice, fairness, punishment, vengeance? Different people ask different questions and so, have different answers when contemplating this. Some ask, “How can we make this person pay?” and others might say, “What is fair?” and still others may say, “What’s the smartest way to move forward?” We all agree we need to protect the citizenry. In a vehicular case, as this one is, we should first look into the guilty party’s ability to drive. We could simply take that privilege away to keep us safe. However, she was found guilty of driving without a license. So she has shown disregard to this restriction. Then maybe for the public’s safety, we ought to put her in the confines of an institution to keep us safer.
In this scenario, however, the questions didn’t stop, or even ever addressed, the safety issue—they rarely do. This case is a special example of showcasing the true meaning behind people’s motives when seeking a conviction. This case uniquely parsed out the safety issue by way of Franco’s illegal presence in the U.S. Evidently, society’s safety was never the main concern. If it was, we would have had no controversy. We’d all be moving forward knowing that Olga Franco is an illegal immigrant who is awaiting deportation. End of story, except most of America seems to like asking the other questions.
“How can she pay?” This question seems to sum up the actual factor in play. What do you think should happen to someone who accidentally kills another in an auto accident? (I do assume sobriety here as well, as Ms. Franco was.) Should we make them a felon and put them in prison for causing an accident, for making a mistake? How many accidents have you caused?
Mistakes are permissible; it’s when they start defining the character of a person from repeated occurrences that we need to look at keeping our roads safe by either removing that person from the road or from society altogether. But it seems when anger and hurt are high enough, we will replace forgiveness, understanding, and logic with hate-backed revenge and waste. Suddenly, justice is not about doing what is right to keep society safe; it gets transposed into a justifiable way to make others hurt as we do.
It’s easier to do this when the circumstances of this case are present. Olga Franco is an illegal alien and is brown and doesn’t speak English. None of this helps empathy. It’s hard for humans to put themselves in another’s place and have understanding when that other person is noticeably different. That’s too bad. When we can react in an understanding way, we begin to ask civilized questions such as “what’s the most positive way to handle this?”, with cooler heads prevailing. Rather, the public expressed relief and joy from the steep punishment. What if this was a white, homegrown individual—your neighbor? Would we show joy from their imprisonment?
Regardless of her identity, I see a 23 year old woman faced with this conviction and soon-to-be lengthy sentence. The kicker to this whole story is that BECAUSE she is an illegal alien, she would be facing deportation immediately. But now that is not until we keep her here to fulfill her sentence.
As in so many other cases involving death, we see the loved ones looking for the perpetrator to be punished severely. Punishment gets doled out. They get their revenge fulfilled. What bothers me as a tax payer is that I have to pay for their vindicated vengeance. In all these cases, does it ever occur to the jury that putting someone away is the equivalent to taking more money from all of us, including themselves and you? They are determining that we ALL should have to pay. I do not know how I would react if my relative died in an accident of someone else’s fault; I just may demand they be put in jail forever—the taxpayers be damned. But as an observer I know what right and wrong are. Wrong, here, is demanding that others are forced to pay because I want to see someone suffer for a long, long time.
We will not only remove that person’s freedoms, but we’ll incur a monetary cost to do so. We will pay to see someone suffer. While I can understand a family’s gut reaction for that, I can’t understand the legal system’s reaction for it.
This whole case could have gone a lot differently if we’d ask the right questions of our justice system. Olga has to live the rest of her life knowing what happened and knowing what she caused. Her hope to amend this and to act in a way to make up for her transgressions is severely limited. She would’ve been deported and so any threat we deemed her as is moot. But now a community supposedly feels better with her as a liability to the state and burden on all of us taxpayers. We’ve just adopted an unproductive prisoner who I’m sure would have suffered enough without prison walls.
Update 11/15/11: In the last few years, Olga Franco has been serving her 12.5 yr sentence in the cells of Shakopee prison. Interestingly, a man who believed in her innocence, wrote and started a relationship with her. They were married in 2009. Nonetheless, she faces deportation upon her release. Her husband, Jerome Harvieux, will go with her back to her native Guatemala.
