Deculpification

Saw a very stimulating episode of Black Mirror today, “White Bear”. A woman with amnesia is chased by hunters throughout the episode. At the end, it’s revealed that she is really a murderess, and the hunting games are punishment for her crime.

A big part of what makes her punishment immoral is that she is unaware of who she is. Merely telling her who she is at the end of the episode is not enough. Because she has no memory of who she is, she cannot confirm or deny anything they are telling her. So they could be telling her a complete fabrication for all that she knows.

What it comes down to is that we punish people because they have a “guilty mind”. The law recognises this in the form of the legal principle of mens rea. But they have erased this woman’s memory of who she is and what she did. They seem clearly, in so doing, to have erased her intention of harm as well, so how can they not have erased her guilty mind along with it?

To be culpable for a crime you must have a guilty mind. So if they have erased her guilty mind, they have also erased her culpability — to coin a term, they have deculpified her. They have effectively reset her guilt to a state of innocence. Therefore, by punishing an innocent person, they are in the wrong.

A relevant trope here on TV Tropes is Amnesiac Dissonance: “She's quite clearly upset when she sees that she assisted in the murder of a little girl.” The host, Baxter, snarls at her, “Oh, don’t start crying. Crocodile tears are making me sick.” But that’s the whole point: we have no reason to believe that they are anything other than genuine tears. All the evidence in the episode suggests that her amnesia has deculpified her.

Babylon 5 tackles this concept far more head-on in “Passing through Gethsemane”. In this episode, we learn that Earth has no death penalty. What it does have, however, is a penalty known as “death of personality”. Essentially, the memories and personality of the guilty person are completely erased. The personality is replaced with an artificial personality that is dedicated to community service. The reconstructed identities are then moved to a part of the galaxy where they are unlikely to run into any relatives of their victims.

Brother Edward is a new arrival at Babylon 5. He starts to have strange visions and nightmares depicting him performing horrific acts. These drive him to research records using the station’s computer to discover the origin of these acts. They enable him to deduce that he was once a serial killer who was punished with death of personality. He also discovers that there are vigilantes responsible for his visions who have targeted him. Burdened with guilt of his previous actions, he allows the vigilantes to find and kill him.

The episode, through the majority of its characters, sympathises with Brother Edward. We consistently see him to be a wonderful and kindly monk. This makes it clear that when he learns what he once was, he welcomes the inevitable retaliation for his crimes. He could have fled the vigilantes, but he chooses instead to meet his fate with dignity. This very act itself is evidence that the death of his former personality has deculpified him.