I’m watching some of the Jodi Arias trial today after having ignored it for weeks. The HLN thing with their declaring everyone guilty without knowing the truth yet kind of turns me off, so I generally ignore this stuff. But a lot of people are fascinated, so I thought I’d take a look. And when looking at the evidence against her, I was reminded of an idea I had a while ago, which is this: Can someone claim a Constitutional right to pursuit of happiness as a murder defense?
Now, I know this is crass, and I’m sorry about that, and this isn’t actually in reference to Jodi Arias at all. But serial killers, when they get caught, what do they say? What’s their defense? It seems to me that the only one they can really claim (aside from trying for an insanity plea, which is a lot harder than it used to be to get, apparently) is that they did it to pursue happiness. You see, we have a Constitutional guarantee of a right to pursuit of happiness, so I suppose someone could argue it, as ridiculous as it sounds (and is). But sillier stuff gets parsed in Constitutional cases than this, believe me! So it’s not really that crazy of a strategy, when you think about it.
So I figure a smart lawyer could say that these earliest mentions of rights in our Declaration of Independence are obviously our most important rights, since they were listed off so early and specifically. And then they could suggest that while the pursuit of happiness is listed last in that list, it is arguably the most important, because maybe the Founding Fathers put them in reverse order of importance, kind of like someone might eat their vegetables first to get them out of the way, and save the best for last. And so then it’s got to be true that the pursuit of happiness is more important than life. With a crazy judge, like the kind that give serial offenders probation (which apparently happens with regularity), it might just work. Crazier things have happened. And then they could just keep appealing to higher and higher courts until they get to the U.S. Supreme Court, and if they rule that the pursuit of happiness is sacrosanct, then serial killers will get to kill everyone legally. And then we could actually get, for our bloodthirsty scandal-monger public, a real-life documentary of some camera crew following a serial killer around, just like in the movies! It would be life imitating art!
