Maybe you’ve heard of Taylor Hess. He’s a
16-year-old high school student from Texas. He’s on the honor
roll and the varsity swim team. He’s been in so little
trouble during school that he’s never even had detention.
Most recently, though, Taylor has been a victim to an unfair
bureaucracy. He was expelled from school last week for having a
weapon. That sounds acceptable, but there is more to Taylor’s
story.
The “weapon” Taylor had wasn’t found on his
body, it was found in his car. And it wasn’t exactly a weapon
so much as it was a bread knife. And it wasn’t so much Taylor
put the knife in his car but that it belonged to his grandmother.
It fell out of a box in his car when he was moving her to assisted
living after she had a stroke. But Taylor was expelled anyway. Does
this seem wrong to anyone?
The problem with Taylor’s expulsion isn’t Taylor
Hess, an excessively disciplinary principal or even the bread knife
found in his car. The problem with Taylor’s expulsion is a
type of law called zero-tolerance.
Zero-tolerance laws are laws that don’t bend or budge.
They don’t say things like “may” or
“can.” They say things like “shall” and
“must.” An example of a zero-tolerance law is something
like, “Every person convicted of murder will serve a term of
twenty-five years in person.” Judges don’t have any
discretion when they decide cases in violation of zero-tolerance
laws. They have to give everyone convicted the same sentence.
Because they are not malleable, zero-tolerance laws are often
ineffective laws. They need to be avoided, unless they are
obviously necessary, because they don’t account for
difference of circumstances and uniqueness of situations.
Take the school district law that got Taylor Hess expelled. That
law read, “A student shall be expelled … if the student on
school property … possesses an illegal knife.” No ifs, ands
or buts about it. That law expels Taylor Hess for the same reason
as someone who brings a machete to class with the intention of
decapitating his classmates.
There’s a lengthy history of zero-tolerance laws causing
problems for lawmakers and victims alike. Because of
California’s “three strikes” law people have been
sentenced to life in prison for stealing batteries or a pizza. Drug
laws instituted in the ’80s put people in prison for 20 years
because they were caught with the same amount of drugs as many
students on college campuses have in a dorm or apartment.
This most recent story of Taylor Hess should be a cue for
lawmakers to learn their lesson. It’s necessary that laws
account for different circumstances when considering appropriate
punishments.
People need to be treated equally in the eyes of the law but
they also need to be treated fairly. We have procedural due process
rights and equal protection to guarantee this. Now we need to
eliminate and avoid creating many zero-tolerance laws to ensure
fairness.
Abraham Lincoln once wrote, “If destruction be our lot, we
must ourselves be its author and finisher.” He was discussing
disobedience and ineffective laws themselves. He said people should
obey laws as they exist, but if a law was clearly ineffective, it
should be changed as quickly as possible.
History has shown us many ineffective zero-tolerance laws punish
people excessively. Lawmakers need to take a stand and make a
change. If they don’t, there will always be people like
Taylor Hess who receive severe punishments for actions that
probably do not warrant punishment at all.