Three life sentences in one week
Justice in this narco-state is getting harder
Last week in the Netherlands, a country where only thirty prisoners are currently serving life sentences, the Public Prosecution Service (OM) took the unusual step of demanding three life sentences, for three different criminals, in the same trial.
Unusual but increasingly common. The OM now requests more life sentences than ever, mostly against criminals involved in the drug trade. As drug crime gets more brutal, as the Netherlands slides into narco-state status, the judiciary is responding with heavier sentencing.
Which sounds logical. Except that these increasingly heavy sentences may reflect the fundamental uselessness of criminal punishment as a tool against drug crime rather than the health of the judicial system.
The case in question last week was the 2021 murder of Peter R. de Vries. He was shot in the head in the evening, right in the middle of Amsterdam, just off the Leidseplein, after leaving a television studio. He died of his injuries nine days later. His murder was a serious moment of national trauma: de Vries, an investigative journalist, was a household name in the Netherlands for his long-running (1995 - 2012) television program Crime Reporter, which covered high-profile, unsolved crimes.
De Vries was not only a very famous BN'er (bekende Nederlander, famous Dutch person), but also a major, respected figure in law and justice itself. Gunned down in broad daylight, so to speak. After the murder, Prime Minister Mark Rutte described de Vries as:
dedicated, tenacious, afraid of nothing and no one. Always seeking the truth and standing up for justice. That makes it all the more dramatic that he himself has now fallen victim to a great injustice.
De Vries was murdered in retaliation for his role as advisor and confidant to Nabil B., the crown witness in a massive trial against drug kingpin Ridouan Taghi. As I have previously written, Taghi ordered executions for seemingly anyone involved in helping Nabil B., including his lawyer, Dirk Wiersum, who was murdered one morning on his residential street in Amsterdam in 2019.
In the de Vries case, the OM recommended life sentences for Delano G., the shooter, Kamil E., the driver, and Krystian M., the coordinator, or “murder broker.”
Vito Shukrula, lawyer to one of the other suspects (there are nine total) in the trial, told the NRC that he thinks the judiciary requests life sentences as a kind of deterrent.
But these kinds of guys don't think: last week I read that someone will get a long sentence for this, then I'm not going to do it. The pool of guys like this is huge.
Pauline Schuyt, Professor of Penal Law and Sentencing at Leiden University, points to the same problem.
With life sentences for liquidations and attacks on our rule of law, the OM hopes above all to deter future contract killers. However, this is an ineffective measure if the goal is purely deterrence. Because if you look at how these kinds of suspects behave during their criminal trial, they show no signs of being affected by the threat of a severe punishment.
Indeed, much of the reporting from the courtroom registered a kind of disgust about the behavior of the suspects during the trial.
The enormous impact of the murder of Peter R. de Vries on society is difficult to reconcile with the behavior of several suspects at the hearing. Some keep their hoodies on. All suspects continually invoke their right to remain silent, even after seemingly simple questions, such as where they went to school. And when the public prosecutor is about to read the sentencing demands, several suspects get up to go to the toilet.
The prospect of a life sentence did not dazzle these criminals into the kind of grim reverence of the rule of law you might expect, in other words.
Demanding a life sentence as punishment for a crime is one of the ultimate expressions of state power in a democracy. So it’s a little depressing that in the Netherlands these sentences ultimately reflect the state’s growing powerlessness over drug crime.
A judiciary disinclined to send people away for life suddenly demanding three life sentences in one trial sends a strong message about what we won’t tolerate in society. It is also a way of indicating that drug crime is spiraling out of control, and the tools typically at our disposal to combat crime are not working. Things are so bad we must now exceed our generally accepted duration of punishment. Our standards are changing.
I say that, yet I do think these life sentences are the right call. If anyone in the Netherlands deserves a life sentence, if there’s anybody the rest of society should be protected from forever, it’s the terrorists like de Vries’ murderers.
This “right call” also feels hopeless. The Dutch judiciary, and all of us in society, too, have witnessed first hand the uselessness of long sentences or maximum-security incarceration as a tool against drug crime. Taghi ordered many of his assassinations, including de Vries’ murder, while he was locked up in the most secure prison in the Netherlands. If incarceration is not a deterrent, and can’t even protect the rest of us, what are we doing?
Well. What else would we do? There’s no better answer. It doesn’t matter that it adds up. All of this state power feels powerless, an element of the narco-state spiral rather than an antidote to it, rather than justice.
These life sentences are still only prosecutorial recommendations. It’s up to a judge to decide. The final verdicts are expected in June.
🔥 Hot Linkjes
Crime
Here we go, the Spanish authorities quelling unrest in Flanders, just like 1566! Last week, Spanish police arrested one of the most-wanted criminals in Europe, the head of a Dutch-Moroccan cocaine cartel, responsible for smuggling billions of euros worth of cocaine from South America to Europe over the last 15 years. (Mitchell Prothero / Vice)
Economy
What Americans get wrong about the European economy. (Paul Krugman / New York Times)
Klass Knot, head of the Dutch Central bank, took stand against anti-immigrant sentiment on NPO1 last weekend. I love this metaphor. Don’t butcher me! “The Dutch economy profits more than any other country from European and international integration. That is our chicken that lays golden eggs and we should not butcher it.” (Diederik Baazil and Cagan Koc / Bloomberg)
Arts
An art analysis to help understanding how the Dutch coped with the frigid Little Ice Age, 1250 - 1860. (Tim Brinkhof / Smithsonian Magazine)
Climate
Speaking of bad weather, 2023 was the warmest and wettest year since they started keeping records in the Netherlands in 1901. (KNMI)
Health
Last week Lauren Hoeve, a twenty eight year-old Dutch woman, died by assisted suicide. She suffered from a number of conditions which sound like a life of torture, from what she told RTL (Dutch). I wrote about the extreme complexities of euthanasia as a medical practice in the Netherlands last summer. (Lydia Hawken / Daily Mail)
🥳 Leuke Dingetjes
A new track from Jungle by Night
They never disappoint!
*all typos in this post are on purpose