The case study - by Matthew Okibe

"So you people actually think she should just go home?" David dropped his phone on the table. We had met up after class for drinks, the usual thing, and somehow the conversation had moved from football to something heavier. Lindsay Clancy. "She was psychotic," David said. "She didn't even know what she was doing. You want to punish someone for something they couldn't control?" "If there's no consequence for action, then what's the point of rules and regulations, or society for that matter," I said. "She doesn't owe society something. But she lives in society. So that is that." David frowned. "That's not an answer. What does living in society actually obligate her to, if she genuinely couldn't tell right from wrong in that moment?" "If you couldn't tell right from wrong," I said, "then what can we as a group not tell right from wrong? She killed the first child. Killed the second. Still killed the third. Let's agree she was disconnected from reality in that moment. But you can't be disconnected from reality and still be living in our reality. We are a product of our society, our associations. So if she cannot associate, she should not be in association with the rest of us that can still relate." David sat back, thinking about that. Sarah shook her head. "So what, you just throw her away? Forget she exists? She's still a human being who was sick." "I never said throw her away and forget her," I said. "She should be looked after. Monitored. Her wellbeing looked after too. What I'm saying is she should not be kept with the rest of us. They say one bad egg can spoil the others. I'm not calling her a bad egg. I'm saying she has influence now, whether she wants it or not. Her case has blown up. Everybody has heard about it. She's going to be a case study, good people and bad people, one way or another. If you leave her out here with free will, free movement, she becomes a case study that could push someone toward doing good, or toward doing evil." "That sounds like you're just afraid of what people will do with her story," Sarah said. "I am. Her being kept away isn't punishment. It's a safety system. It's keeping the rest of us safe, not just from her, from ourselves. Because the greatest danger to a mind isn't always someone else's influence. Sometimes it's your own choice, once you've seen it's possible." David shrugged. "Okay but people are already watching her. Case closed, trial's over. What's the actual danger of her walking free, besides people talking about it?" "It's not just people talking about it," I said. "It's people learning from it. People are already learning from how this case went. Some will take it as a blueprint to escape punishment in the future. So the answer isn't letting her go completely free. It rules that possibility out of their mind, that if you do this and say you're mentally ill, you can escape, go to a psychiatric ward, and plan your way out of it from there. No. When people know there will be consequences, there will be follow-up, there will be monitoring, even inside that psychiatric ward, it shuts down the probability of that happening. It stops people from using her as a point to overlook the idea completely." Sarah tilted her head. "Wait. If she's confined, monitored, can't leave the ward, can't move freely... isn't that already a punishment? So why do you keep saying it's not punishment?" "Fair," I said. "She's confined, she's monitored, she can't move freely. That does look like punishment. But think about it, not everybody experiences confinement the same way. Some people don't care about moving around freely. Some people would actually welcome being locked away, if it means certain people can't reach them anymore. That's not really about her. The point is this: there's a way of stating something that makes it read as punishment, and a way of stating the same thing that makes it read as a pardon. It's not really about what happens to her. It's about how it's carried out, and how it's worded." Sarah didn't answer right away. Neither did David. I thought about it for a second before I answered. "Look at us," I said. "Look at Nigeria. People fight for Nnamdi Kanu to be released. People fight for IPOB members to be released. Meanwhile, Boko Haram starts to look inconsequential, because we're willing to rehabilitate them. Meanwhile in Niger State, over thirty inmates just died in detention, because they were mining illegally. Nobody's asking who let them mine in the first place. So the consequence doesn't fall on the person responsible. It falls on whoever's easiest to blame. It's not really about the crime. It's about how unclear we've let the punishment become. If there was a proper, clear-cut directive for what happens when you do wrong, nobody would misread it. Nobody would misinterpret it." I looked at both of them. "Mental illness or no mental illness, what she did was wrong. A life was taken. And life is not something you take back because you found the freedom to end it. There is no justice in a society where people are not held accountable for their wrongdoings. There is no justice in a society like that.

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