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By Root 978 0

of neighbors and politicians, the shock waves through the community, and of course the eventual sentence—I couldn’t help but think about what would have happened had Joseph Gray come along an instant later. Naturally there would have been no accident, and Maria Herrera, her sister, and her son would have gone along their merry way. She would have given birth to Ricardo weeks later, hopefully lived a long and happy life, and would never have thought twice about the van speeding erratically along Third Avenue that summer evening. Joseph Gray would have picked up his fellow officer in Staten Island, who presumably would have insisted on driving back to Brooklyn. Gray might have gotten a reprimand from his supervisor, or he might have gotten away with it altogether. But regardless, he would have gone home to his wife and three children the next day and gotten on with his quiet, unremarkable existence.

ALL’S NOT WELL THAT ENDS WELL

OK, I know what you’re thinking. Even if Gray’s driving drunk did not make the accident inevitable, it did increase the likelihood that something bad would happen, and his punishment was justified in terms of his behavior. But if that’s true, then versions of his crime play out all the time. Every day, police officers—not to mention public officials, parents, and others—get drunk and drive their cars. Some of them are as drunk as Joseph Gray was that night, and some of them drive just as irresponsibly. Most of them don’t get caught, and even the few who do are rarely sent to jail. Few are subject to the punishment and public vilification that befell Joseph Gray, who was labeled a monster and a murderer. So what was it about Joseph Gray’s actions that made him so much worse than all these others? No matter how reprehensible, even criminal, you think his actions that day were, they would have been exactly as bad had he walked out of the bar a minute later, or had the light been green, or had the Herreras been momentarily delayed while walking down the street, or had they seen the car coming and sped up or slowed down. Nevertheless, even if you subscribe to Judge Feldman’s logic that everyone who is driving a van drunk down a city street is a potential killer of mothers and children, it is hard to imagine charging every driver who has had a few too many drinks—or these days, anyone texting or talking on a cell phone—to fifteen years in prison, simply on the grounds that they might have killed someone.

That the nature of the outcome should matter is about as commonsense an observation as one can think of. If great harm is caused, great blame is called for—and conversely, if no harm is caused, we are correspondingly inclined to leniency. All’s well that end’s well, is it not? Well, maybe, but maybe not. To be clear, I’m not drawing any conclusion about whether Joseph Gray got a fair trial, or whether he deserved to spend the next fifteen years of his life in prison; nor am I insisting that all drunk drivers should be treated like murderers. What I am saying, however, is that in being swayed so heavily by the outcome, our commonsense notions of justice inevitably lead us to a logical conundrum. On the one hand, it seems an outrage not to punish a man who killed four innocent people with the full force of the law. And on the other hand, it seems grossly disproportionate to treat every otherwise decent, honest person who has ever had a few too many drinks and driven home as a criminal and a killer. Yet aside from the trembling hand of fate, there is no difference between these two instances.

Quite possibly this is an inconsistency that we simply have to live with. As sociologists who study institutions have long argued, the formal rules that officially govern behavior in organizations and even societies are rarely enforced in practice, and in fact are probably impossible to enforce both consistently and comprehensively. The real world of human interactions is simply too messy and ambiguous a place ever to be governed by any predefined set of rules and regulations; thus the business of getting on with