Courtesy of the Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States

Ever since the institution began, and certainly since the 1970s, the American death penalty has been an object of insatiable scrutiny in the criminal justice system of the West. Europe is appalled that we still have it. The Middle East is appalled that we don’t use it more frequently. In some states it’s non-existent, others it’s little more than a myth, and there are still some that can’t seem to get enough of it. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Texas.) So the debate will go on until the unlikely day when the federal government abolishes executions altogether.

Yet even while the fires of the capital punishment debate show no signs of cooling, a recent Supreme Court ruling has started afresh a new debate, rooted in the same constitutional criticism as execution-abolition. With executions on the decline while recidivism has been inching its way up the charts over nearly three decades, those lovable lefties have taken up the faithful arms of that pesky Eighth Amendment once more in order to propel the next Great Debate: life imprisonment for minors.

The Eighth Amendment states, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines be imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” That’s it. Seventeen simple, highly interpretable words, upon which universalists, liberals, and abolitionists have stood tall and proud on ethical, moral and political soapboxes to proclaim all that is wrong with the punitive branch of our justice system, particularly when it comes to the death penalty. For some, execution of any sort is seen as cruel and unusual, though it is, ironically, one of the most consistent forms of punishment throughout history, which surely excludes it from being unusual. Then there are the conditionalists who insist that only some forms of execution are cruel and unusual, as though we might be able to convince the condemned — or even ourselves — that we really do care for their well-being if we poison them instead of bludgeoning them to death; firing squads are mean, but hanging is okay; gas chambers leave a bad political aftertaste, but electrocution gets a majority thumbs-up. Still yet there are the legalists who rightly point out that the certainty of someone’s guilt is rarely substantial enough to take his or her life — perhaps the most tolerable and certainly the most logical of the arguments. And then at the farthest liberal end, the place where idealism trumps truth, there are those whose only wobbly leg to stand on is the one that says everyone deserves a second chance. But while an unstable footing may be enough to prop up the Eighth Amendment against death, it only touts social idealism and naivety when positioned against the argument of life in prison.

The case highlighted here is that of Graham v. Florida in which Terrence Graham, a minor at the time, was given a plea deal to avoid a guilty judgment in an alleged armed robbery. One of the terms of that deal was a probationary period, which he allegedly violated, sending him back to court for adjudication for the original robbery. At that time he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

The argument, which the Supreme Court upheld, was rooted in the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, and cites a series of other cases in both recent and not-so-recent history which have set precedent to define what is “cruel and unusual”. Without getting into the nitty gritty, the Court’s majority opinion is summed up by Justice Kennedy, who argues that a minor should have an opportunity to change. He writes, “Life in prison without the possibility of parole gives no chance for fulfillment outside prison walls, no chance for reconciliation with society, no hope.” This, he says, makes the punishment both cruel and unusual.

But Justice Kennedy is operating on an idealist principle which says that the prison system is designed for reform rather than the truth, which is that prison has much more to do with punishment. For years the criminal justice system has been trumpeting to the media about incarceration’s rehabilitative qualities– how it shouldn’t be seen as an entirely punitive measure, that there is much more to it than locking them up and throwing away the key. Sadly, Justice Kennedy, a would-be conservative who can’t seem to stop drinking the liberal draught, has enthusiastically pledged to sing along.

The truth is, though, that no matter how many educational programs, social workers, religious institutions, or other rehabilitative measures are put into place within prison walls, the system itself will continue to keep itself in business as long as it continues to put the problem children together on the playground without supervision. Indeed, such a metaphor breeds a sense of irony because it is exactly in the school system where we see a similar sociological phenomenon. Take children even from well-to-do families and put them in the best educational institutions around, but the ones who have a penchant for trouble will not only find it, but they will find each other, and from these associations they will often go on to break more rules than they would have had they never met.

Prison is exponentially worse because it only houses the troublesome ones; strictly speaking, there are no “good” social influences. There is frequently street or even gang mentality in prison: demand respect by instilling fear even if it means resorting to violence; the weak will cling to the strong in order to protect themselves, and any opposition perpetually risks life and limb.

Even outside of violence, in the regular day-to-day of prison life, social interactions will, if innocently in the beginning, veer down the wrong path. Inmates will surely make small talk as humans are wont to do, except unlike the world outside prison walls, no one is going to start a conversation with, “So, what do you do for work?” Clearly, nothing anymore. The more natural icebreaker becomes the Hollywood favorite, “So, what are you in for?”

I bring up the obvious to point out the subtle: inmates frequently talk about crime. For a few, it’s all they know. And given the choice between slowly muddling through high school equivalent education or anger management courses, teaching inmates theories with little hope of opportunity for application, or learning from one another about how to get further, faster, the majority tend to sway towards the latter, thus perpetuating the very criminal mentality the system claims to be reforming. So when the “second chance” comes around, ex-offenders become re-offenders, recidivism rates hover at a staggering two-thirds for re-arrest and fifty percent for re-incarceration (so much for rehabilitation), and criminals find themselves right back in the over-crowded system that has already failed them once.

Herein lies the true violation of the Eighth Amendment. To merely prohibit life imprisonment for a minor only looks good politically. But practically, when that minor is released from prison in twenty or even ten years, he’s still going to have a long, uncertain — and yes, frightening — road ahead of him. He has learned only how to function in a unique population subset with no real understanding of how the world outside is working. (Think how much society changes in ten years, let alone twenty or more.) To send him back out into that now-unknown world with fifty dollars, no identification, and a list of homeless shelters to be turned away from is far crueler (though I’m afraid not very unusual) than to keep him in prison for the rest of his life. Even in the cases of ex-offenders being released to family and friends, to do so without further guidance than a weekly tousling with parole officers (who, often times, are ill-equipped themselves to deal with the trials of the parolee’s societal reintegration) is to set them up for failure. Well-intentioned as family and friends often are, they are just as often unable to shoulder the burden reintegration presents, and perhaps more often become part of the problem.

In fairness, it isn’t the High Court’s job to create new laws, only to uphold or strike down the rulings of lower courts. But as long as legal precedent will be the result of the Court’s decision, it would behoove the system to take further action. If Justice Kennedy and his liberal cronies want to make a real difference in the justice system, they should have a few conversations with their buddies in legislation about how we can provide the rehabilitative services offered in prison post-incarceration, rather than piously denouncing one punishment as unconstitutional while the alternative is hardly better and possibly worse. With the billions of dollars the federal government pumps into policies governing education for those who already have it, money for those who should share more of it, and wars that should be dwindling down instead of revving up, surely there can be some reallocation towards reintegration, among other things. Then, and only then, will we be able to adhere to the principles and intentions of the Eighth Amendment while simultaneously moving one step closer to providing some of those in need with a second chance that may actually have the sustenance to bear the fruit the system presently pretends to grow.

That’s because debate is arguing for the pure joy, passion and zeal of argumentation. Clearly, this draws a certain kind of personality. To a true, cross-ex-in-the-bones debater, disputation is simply conversation. The activity of competitive debate is good for him and all of us. When he unleashes his innate disputatiousness in the school cafeteria, he’s annoying. But in the tightly structured forum of debate where his speeches have time limits and there are moments he has to shut up, that orneriness is tamed and polished. He becomes the kind of arguer the world could use more of.

To promote his memoir Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate, Mark Oppenheimer held a debate at his high school alma mater Regis High School in New York City. Oppenheimer and a high school senior debater, Joseph Eddy, faced off against journalist Hanna Rosin and Stuvyesant High School debater Claire Littlefield, debating the resolution, “Is American political dialogue in trouble?”

I walked in the room completely prejudiced. How could anyone not believe that American political dialogue was in trouble? Clicking Twitter headlines from my couch, I cringe at the outrageous statements of entire swaths of the American population. How, I scoffed, could anyone NOT believe that American political dialogue is clearly doomed?

But as the debaters stood and gave their opening arguments, I found myself falling back into an  old pattern from back in my debate days: the tabula rasa. This means your mind becomes a blank slate – all of your preconceptions and prejudices erased, your mind wiped clean, and ready to judge each argument on its merit and evidence.

The men, affirming  that the American dialogue was in trouble, gave their case, and the women argued for the negative side against it. They sparred in cross-examinations and gave rebuttals. As Rosin and Littlefield spoke, I found myself switching allegiances. The aff was so obvious, the neg more nimble. The neg had a harder premise to prove and they were creative and spirited in the way they constructed their case. They were more clever about their arguments. Proving their side took more finesse.

Besides that, I almost always feel inclined to pull for female debaters over male. Being a female debater takes poise and a willingness to go toe-to-toe with men who are bigger than you. When I was a 98-pound little-voiced slip of a thing, I debated oafs who were six feet tall. Their voices commanded the room and their figures dwarfed mine when we got up for cross-ex.  Female debaters face what female candidates and female CEOs do: the perennial prejudice that audiences will view spirit as shrillness and confidence as masculinity. Female debaters must root for one another to succeed.

And yet as the debate progressed and I followed each argument, charting its flow (yes, we call it a “flow chart” in debate terminology), the debate came down to a single question for me. Please remember that I am paraphrasing and both might quibble that I’m omitting certain nuances, but the gist of the argument was this:

The women were arguing that the fringe elements of the American dialogue – the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs and Keith Olbermanns – were actually good for American dialogue. They admitted the fringe was fringe but said that despite all that, the fringe was a vital part of American dialogue and denying them their distasteful opinions would be un-American.

The aff argued that this made no sense. If American dialogue is dominated by extremists who care about partisan politics over truth, then how could this possibly be a good thing? If the neg conceded the premise that wingnuts dominated the debate, could they still argue that American political dialogue was just fine? If they admitted extremists were loudest, did they have an argument for why it was good that extremists were loud? I went from one side to the other and back again as I watched the debate. And finally, the question came down not to my personal prejudices but to the question, “Who made the argument the other side didn’t answer fully?” I didn’t hear a satisfying argument for the virtues of wingnuts. If I had been casting a ballot I would have said yes, the American political dialogue is in trouble.

It would be in less trouble if leaders had to debate like those students did. In high school debate, you take turns debating each side of an issue. Imagine if Congress had to abide by the rules of high school debate. Imagine if we presented them with the health care bill and told them they had to switch sides. The Democrats had to come up with the best, most sophisticated arguments against health care and the Republicans had to passionately defend the health care bill against all arguments against it. Whoever won the debate got to choose the outcome of the bill. If Republicans won, they could kill the bill; if Democrats won, it lived.

We would have a different kind of debate I imagine. For one thing, it would be more objective. Each side would be arguing for the side they abhorred, but for the sake of winning for the side they loved. It would cool the heat that comes not from facts but from resentment and fear and pandering. The debate is now about evidence and arguments, not about how you feel.

Doing this helps you see the other side. It helps you see where your own arguments are weakest when you find yourself skewering the argument you believe and questioning the evidence you personally find credible. You discard arguments that are bad and find evidence that has weight.

Afterwards it was said that if students like Eddy and Littlefield were American’s political future, then American dialogue would one day prosper. It was true.

Do the arguments of even the greats change minds?

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been teaching arguing, or persuasive, essays in my freshmen composition courses. I save this format, along with evaluating essays, for last because in some sense they utilize all the skills that the students have picked up through the practice of writing, remembering, observing, and explaining essays in the previous weeks and months.

That’s one reason why I save these types for last, and it’s the better reason. The other reason is that I know from experience that it’s hard to keep everybody’s attention – the students’ and my own – focused in the waning weeks of a semester, particularly a spring semester when the weather is warming and summer vacation is on the horizon, and arguing and evaluating essays are my, and often my students’, favorite types to read and write.

I assign several readings for each essay form, chosen because they are prime examples of the particular type and though they often change, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” has a permanent home in the arguing section of my syllabus. For those readers who have not sat through a semester of class with me (or any countless other composition courses that utilize King’s classic text): it is an epistle written while King was in the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama after being arrested for taking part in non-violent protests there. The letter is a response to “A Call For Unity,” a statement published by eight white Alabama clergymen in which they conceded that injustices were taking place, but that protest, even non-violent, was not appropriate and that proper, legal means should be pursued.

King states his case in no less than nine points (he even apologizes at the end for writing so much and makes reference to the fact that there’s not much else to do when one is in prison). There is no doubt in my mind that this is one of the greatest arguing essays ever written, offering some of the most airtight arguments ever made. The now famous line, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” appears in this text.

What I have never known about this essay, and still to this day cannot say for certain, is what effect this text had first on its intended audience, the signatories of “A Call for Unity.” I know that every time I read it I get chills and that most of my students come to venerate it, but as far as I can tell from my admittedly very limited research on the topic (Google “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and, most unfortunately, over 95% of the results are for free term papers on the essay) there is not much written about whether or not it “worked.”

Now, of course, to a certain extent it did work, as did MLK’s social action, speeches, and sadly, his death, in addition to the work of countless other civil rights advocates, but whenever I think specifically about the impact of “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” I can’t help but wonder if it actually changed any of the clergymen’s minds, or had a life-altering affect on any residents of Birmingham.

And I wonder about this in regard to many arguments I hear made, debates I witness, and apologists I read. Do all these words, all this time spent building a case, ever actually work to convince somebody that the position that they hold is wrong and that they should exchange it for another, more correct stance?

And yet, I know that people do change their minds. I don’t know how I would describe myself politically prior to 2001, but I know that whatever it was (must’ve been somewhere between far right and right of the center, as that’s where my parents, church, and educators were coming from), by 2002, my views were very different from those of the people that had an influence on me in my youth. I can point to a few definitive books I read (Franny and Zooey, On the Road . . . yeah, I know), and some very important people I met, conversations I had, and things I experienced (studying in Kenya was big in this regard), but I can’t point a finger to any one thing as the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I’ve come to realize that, for the most part, I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, semester after semester I make my students read and write arguing essays. And then I evaluate them on the clarity of their writing, certainly, but also on their ability to form a cohesive point and defend it. I teach them about three different kinds of arguments: traditional (I’m right, you’re wrong), constructive (I’m right, and I want to help you see why you’re wrong), and Rogerian (I’m right, but you may also be right, let’s compromise), but more often than not they choose the traditional style. And I’ve had some good writers over the years, but not once has one of them convinced me of anything I didn’t already believe. Nobody wins the argument, yet I still make each student do it.

Why do I continue to believe that learning how to make an effective argument is important when I really think it’s not a good argument that changes a person’s mind but a series of events, experiences, and lessons learned? Perhaps some of those influential books, essays, and stories that I read back in 2002 were argumentative in nature, and certainly my views grew more nuanced and I became more certain of what I was coming to believe through arguments, but not to the point where I feel comfortable saying an argument changed my mind.

It’s a scary thing to change one’s mind, to admit that the beliefs and values one clings to may not be as deeply held as once thought. And for a person so often prideful as I am, it is also a deeply humbling experience to reevaluate and to be found wrong. I know this is the case not simply based on 2002, or even on any of the hundreds of minor changes and course corrections that I’ve made in the years since, but because I fear it may be happening again.

I’m halfway through famed (infamous?) evangelical author Brian D. McLaren’s latest offering, A New Kind of Christianity. The book has attracted a lot of attention, mostly because of the overwhelming wave of extremely negative reviews it is garnering from other evangelicals. I’ve read McLaren before but, based on some of the commentary I’d heard about this book, even I approached it with some trepidation, with a bit of fear that he may have gone too far.

McLaren’s book is an argument, an apologetic. If I had to classify it for my class I would say it’s somewhere between a traditional and a constructive argument. The details of his case for a new kind of Christianity are the subject for a different sort of essay, but suffice it to say, his argument is made well. His points are clear and rational and, most importantly in an arguing essay, he appeals to what the reader may have already thought or believed though may never have given voice to.

This is a tactic I encourage my students to use, one that Martin Luther King, Jr. used miraculously. It involves knowing your audience and making an appeal to them that is both respectful and transformative. McLaren knows me. Like King knew his fellow clergymen, McLaren knows his left-leaning evangelical.

I can’t say where this will all end up, or where I’ll be when the pieces land. But I can say that I’m beginning to believe more fully in the power of the arguing essay. I can say that I’m beginning to change my mind.

When I was very young, my aunt and uncle gave me a ponderous elephant pendant necklace on a heavy silver chain. It was a necklace befitting a 45-year-old portly professional – the kind of necklace that would go well with an expansive plush suit in a matronly hue.

“We thought of you when we saw this,” they said. I looked at it and said, “Thanks.”

They said this because I made everyone think about elephants. I brought elephants to the mind because I wore shirts that said “W. for President” and had a red-white-and-blue George W. Bush campaign tote bag. I had a collection of small elephant figurines because elderly relatives kept buying them and saying, “We saw this and thought of you.” I was the kind of child who walked her precinct during Republican primaries and attended state Republican party conventions on weekends. I woke up at 8:00 on Saturday morning to attend county GOP meetings. I was accompanied to these meetings by frail old Republican women who wore tapestry suits woven with elephant patterns and dangly elephant earrings. By anyone’s account it was my destiny to one day become a frail old Republican woman in an elephant-patterned suit, in which case the pendulous necklace would serve my wardrobe well.

I did not become that woman, but I have never – even in seasons of political ambivalence – stopped wearing political t-shirts. When a friend of mine said the other day that she would have nowhere to wear a political t-shirt, it startled me. To me, the only wrong place to wear a political t-shirt is church.

In 2008 I was, for the first time, an undecided voter. Never mind the journey that took me from George W. Bush tote bags to a crisis of political faith, but for the first time I felt myself pulled in two different directions. At first I decided not to vote at all, just for the principle of the thing – because it seemed unfair that I should have to choose between so many principles I held equally. But then one bright Sunday I walked through Union Square, which was brimming with campaign regalia from New York’s hippest artists. I could have bought twenty fashionista political t-shirts but my eye lit upon a light blue one with darker blue lettering that said “Blondes for …” Well, I’ll let you guess.

It was perfect. It said, “I am a blonde and I am my own special interest group, like lesbian Latinas or gun-toting Irishmen. This is my vote and while I am confident enough to advertise my vote on my boobs, there is a part of me that realizes if I have chosen wrongly it won’t be the end of the world; but still I am actually making my choice.”

Or maybe I just thought it was cute and I wanted to buy it as a companion for my “Blondes not Bombs” t-shirt. But I bought it – and the moment of buying the t-shirt and the moment of final decision were almost one and the same. My friend said, “Well I guess you’ve made up your mind then.” And I realized I had.

I wear political t-shirts both to make friends and make enemies. It’s my way of stubbornly standing up for myself when I feel stifled, and finding out who’s standing with me. I bought a t-shirt from Brooklyn Industries that showed Sarah Palin crowning a beatifically smiling Hillary Clinton Miss America. The artistry was ambiguous. (Hillary Clinton was hotter on the t-shirt than she was in real life). The message was somewhat ambiguous, too: Was Sarah Palin crowning Hillary Clinton the next woman in the White House because Palin had already won the White House? Or was Palin ceding First Female President to Hillary Clinton? I gave it my own interpretation. I bought it, loved it, got into arguments over it and lost it when I went to a primarily Republican wedding in Ohio – a memory that still makes me bitter as I search eBay for a replacement I have not yet been able to find.

Sometimes I like to buy my t-shirts a little to the left or right of where I actually am. My latest acquisition is a little pink vintage number that says, “Vote Democrat: A clean sweep.” I am not a Democrat, but I wear it to be a little perverse when I meet up with friends who campaign for Scott Brown. I want a t-shirt with a Jimmy Carter slogan of a grinning peanut, but Jimmy Carter is so lame that I’m torn. Perhaps a McGovern t-shirt with a dove of peace instead: obscure enough that pretty much no one will get it but relevant to today.

I wore that “Blondes” shirt right up until and on Election Day. Campaigners loved it. Elderly black women loved it. A boy staggering drunkenly through the West Village on Election Night also loved it. It’s ratty now but I still wear it to the gym, where nobody comments on it anymore. The big 2008 moment has passed. The hope is all tired and worn out – like my shirt – and no one will care to wear political t-shirts until 2012. Except me.

The truth is that the protocol is not clean and it has very little to do with justice.

There was a time in my life when I regularly exercised a very reckless lack of judgment. During that time, I decided that the most satisfying future I could pursue would be in the world of law. Since I was transferring schools anyway—more reckless judgment—I jumped at the opportunity to change majors as well. Armed with a stubborn persistence and what I interpreted to be omniscience, I set off to change the world through the fisheye lens of the criminal justice system.

As it turns out, cynical people like me don’t really find much reception in the justice system. (I know. I was surprised, too.) But as I took my first steps into the world of justice, I found it difficult to be any other way. How was it that the United States of America, arguably at the helm of the greatest justice system in the world, could still see so much corruption, so much frivolity? How were men and women dodging murder verdicts based on trial technicalities while I couldn’t even get out of a speeding ticket? Something had gone unquestionably awry.

Yet much of the corruption is subtler than it seems. Indeed, while some legislation has evolved into ludicrous formality, there is no doubt that it once had roots in the protection of human rights.

Take, for example, the Constitutional right to due process. Any person tried on American soil is entitled to a trial and cannot be deprived of “life, liberty or property without due process of law.” But entitlement should not be the same thing as requirement and due process of law should not mean fruitless formalities, both things that the State of Arkansas ought to consider in the case of Abdul Hakim Muhammad. Muhammad is accused of killing one military private and injuring another in a shooting at a recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas last June. Once in custody, Muhammad said that he wanted to plead guilty, citing religious reasons for his actions. Arkansas, however, does not allow a suspect to plead guilty to a capital crime. Informed of this, Muhammad thought he was being led astray and most recently wrote a letter to the judge, bypassing his attorneys, stating that he is guilty, he wants no trial, and he stands by his actions as an act of jihad. So far, Muhammad must still plead not guilty and be tried for his crimes.

The overarching theme of what’s going on here is that the justice system—driven by an increasingly corrupt world of politics—is focusing less on discovering truth and serving justice and more focused on the political and social ramifications of its actions; in other words, the system is now riddled with laws which function more as clauses to cover the State than they do as statutes to protect human rights.

Forcing Muhammad through a trial brings up a number of major concerns, not least of which is that he could very well be found not guilty. The logical man would say that doesn’t seem possible, but the justice system no longer operates on logic but on politics and in this case, politics says that there may be technicalities in the time leading up to trial where a jury legally cannot convict Muhammad. These technicalities once acted as protection against human rights, but they have been corrupted largely by idealist defense attorneys who treat legal proceedings like a philosophy class where semantics hold more sway than truth. To people such as these, criminal justice is comparable to a high school debate team and the result is that some criminals who deserve to be punished are walking the streets which American people otherwise believe to be safe.

Admittedly, though, if Muhammad goes to trial, he likely will be found guilty, which brings up a different concern: tax dollars. If it isn’t already bad enough that the people of any state have to foot the housing bill for convicted felons, it is downright unthinkable to require the people to pay for a trial for a man who is happy to confess, entirely apart from duress, and accept the penalty. The cost of a pointless trial on top of the cost of even a single year of holding a convicted felon in a maximum security prison or death row tops out at hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the risk of sounding callous, why spend more than we have to?

The root of the answer probably comes from a deep history of coerced confessions and botched trials. With DNA evidence rescuing hundreds if not thousands of people from life and death sentences, cost considerations carry less weight as mitigating factors when the possibility of an innocent man paying for a crime he didn’t commit remains. But to go so far as to prohibit a guilty plea can only be relevant when there remains a very distinct question of truth, such as when a man confesses but then maintains his innocence later on, as in as the tragic case of Amanda Knox. But while Knox’s confession may have been coerced and was certainly retracted, Muhammad has all but boasted of his guilt, and he’s continued to do so for seven months. Under such circumstances, it seems that Arkansas’ law needs a bit of tweaking.

The law, however, is unlikely to be tweaked, because whether it’s wasting resources or truly saving innocent lives, it covers the government’s back, which seems more the more likely interest for the State in the first place. Rejecting a guilty plea in a capital case proclaims that Arkansas will not see any man martyred, whether for religious reasons or otherwise. Rejecting a guilty plea from a self-professed Muslim extremist tells the world that America gives even radical religious zealots a fair shot. There’s no religious bigotry here, no animal bloodletting. Just good, clean, criminal justice protocol.

The truth is that the protocol is not clean and it has very little to do with justice. States are endlessly embattled in a similar struggle when it comes to the death penalty, as the states which still execute inmates seek to prove to opponents that there is somehow a method of taking another man’s life which doesn’t amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Granted, that while the Constitution remains as interpretable as the Bible, there are certain words and phrases in the Bill of Rights that simply don’t leave much room for evaluation. Killing a man by its very nature is cruel and unusual. Waiving your right to a trial is, by its very nature, due process of law, as long as the accused has been given the right in the first place. Muhammad obviously was and if he’d rather not be tried, if he’d rather simply confess and go to the gallows, then it should not be the burden of the people to see his way through the system simply so the State of Arkansas can boast a clean conscience.

The criminal justice system was designed to discover truth. Instead, it has become a place of political struggle where too many lawyers care too much about the game, too many judges care too much about appointments, and too many governors and legislators are more interested in appearing compassionate when the system they work for is still based in punishment, not rehabilitation. If Americans want to be the nice guys then we should do away with prison altogether and find a way to help offenders become functioning members of society, not force unwanted trials on criminal suspects, burdening already-strained American citizens in the process. Those who make their beds with determination to lie in them should be allowed to do so. The criminal justice system has plenty of other problems to deal with.

Snake, c.1860. Gold, diamond. Photo: John Bigelow Taylor

Ask Sarah Palin after everyone learned she spent $150,000 on clothes. Ask Cindy McCain after the media slammed her for wearing an outfit that totaled $300,000. Ask Hillary Clinton when the media needled her for restlessly changing her hair style again and again. Ask Michelle Obama after Robin Givhan gushed that when Obama “bounded onto the stage in her sleeveless dresses, with her muscular post-Title IX arms in full view, the definition of a strong woman changed.”

It matters what a woman in politics wears. Every sartorial choice has significance-painting a political woman as shallow or thoughtless or mannish or callous or strong or rebellious or docile. But while women in politics should know all of this, the choices they make are often either thoughtless (wearing a $300,000 outfit while your husband tries to brand his opponent as an elitist) or carefully constrained by the rigid roles the country expects them to play.

The messages are either clumsy and wrong or so subtle that people find in them what they will. For instance, after XX Factor’s Hanna Rosin saw a picture of Obama delicately plying a shovel while wearing a long belted sweater and stylish boots, Rosin said, “I’m beginning to think Michelle rebels against the strictures offirst lady life silently, through her outfits, the sartorial equivalents of a middle finger.” A fashion analyst wondered if Obama wore her famous purple sheath dress at the convention because purple is a mix of red and blue. But who knows?

However, a display at the Museum of Art and Design shows a leader who walks a bold but dainty path in female political fashion. These fashion choices are bold. The messages they send are clear, but they’re also whimsical and utterly feminine.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was the first female Secretary of State and famous for using her collection of costume jewelry pins to send gentle diplomatic prods. The display shows over 200 of her signature pins. Some of them are delicate but most of them are ponderous-the kind of pins you would need a very serious, sober suit to sustain-and so big that they tore holes in Albright’s serious suits, which she then covered with larger pins.

She began using pins to send messages after the state-run Iraqi press called her a serpent in a cunningly titled poem, “To Madeleine Albright, Without Greetings.” It went something like this: “Albright, Albright, all right, all right, you are the worst in this night.” The writer went on to weave in a menagerie of animal imagery, penning, “Albright, no one can block the road to Jerusalem with a frigate, a ghost, or an elephant” and calling Albright an “unparalleled serpent.” The next time she went to Iraq she wore a jeweled serpent entwined around a stick, with a diamond hanging down for its tongue. When the media asked her why, she said it was because the Iraqis thought she was a snake.

She wore wasps when she wanted to send a message with a bit of a sting. She wore a jeweled bug, made of amethyst, chalcedony and gold, to Russia after a Russian official bugged the State Department. She used turtles to complain about the slow progress of peace. She wore balloons to symbolize satisfaction when talks were going well.

When she met with Vladimir Putin and wanted to send a message about Russia ignoring human rights violations in Chechnya, she wore three chubby, Buddha-like monkeys miming “hear no evil,” “see no evil,” “speak no evil.” When she met to navigate talks about nuclear arms, she wore an abstract representation of an arrow, made of anodized aluminum. A diplomat looked down at her pin and said, “Is this one of your interceptor missiles?” She told him, “Yes, and as you can see, we know how to make them very small. So you’d better be ready to negotiate.”

She seems to wear them with a knowledge too many women in politics forget-the knowledge that’s she’s a woman and not a man, and that any disadvantages to being a woman are best deflected with a sly sense of humor instead of acting like a man. A foreign minister mistakenly told reporters that he enjoyed hugging Albright because of her “firm breasts.” Of course outrage followed, which Albright deflected when reporters asked what she thought and she quipped, “Well, I’ve got to have somewhere to put those pins.” Then, of course, she bought a red fox pin-for when she was feeling flirty-to commemorate the occasion.

She told Newsweek, “I love being a woman and I was not one of these women who rose through professional life by wearing men’s clothes or looking masculine. I loved wearing bright colors and being who I am.” It’s an intentional, dignified use of femininity to send a political message that’s bold and clear. It’s fashion that bends the rigidity of female roles, while at the same time not sacrificing the femininity it’s absolutely just that female leaders keep.