The Kristin Lardner Case
The Kristin Lardner Case
The divide between a theoretical discourse and its practical application has long become a pressing issue for many a concept created by the continuously inventive human mind. Just like when it comes to a practical application of justice, capitalism, socialism and the like, the concept of bureaucracy, in and of itself, initially was created in order to facilitate certain aspects of a society, in this case – its governance. The bureaucratic machine was supposed to be a means of establishing a regulated system of authority. As Max Weber aptly puts it, “The principles of office hierarchy and of levels of graded authority mean a firmly ordered system of super- and subordination in which there is a supervision of the lower offices by the higher ones” (Weber 1946). However, despite the rational and beneficial intent behind the concept, it failed to account for one definitive factor, which puts the whole bureaucratic system in jeopardy and leads us to question its efficiency and validity as a whole.
The human factor is a Trojan horse hiding within the gears of the machine, threatening to undermine it and uncover its faults and failures. No matter how well attuned the instrument is, it will never be able to account for every human being acting as a part of the bureaucratic body. Weber believes that “in the great majority of cases, he is only a single cog in an evermoving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march” (Weber 1946), yet a single mistake of that tiny ‘cog’ could disrupt the operation of the entire apparatus. And the most dangerous part is that there is no predicting when and where that ‘cog’ might malfunction and what might cause it. It could be an individual emotional response, it could be corruption, it could be personal bias, it could be plain old negligence. In any case, it leads to a mistake on a lower bureaucratic level, which at first glance might seem like an insignificant disruption, easy to fix on a higher level. Yet more often than not, the mishaps made by the lower level officials are simply ignored or forgotten by the higher-ups because they tend to assume that these small fractures in the bureaucratic foundation will be of no consequence on a larger scale. And that is the first and principal complication that comes with trying to set up an impeccably functioning bureaucratic machine – the neglect towards the small transgressions. Because eventually the accumulation of these deceptively minor misjudgements tend to escalate into a giant snowball threatening to harm a great many people.
This is precisely why examining and understanding the Kristin Lardner case is so important. The young woman became a victim of this very situation: the system failed her because a whole range of individual bureaucrats that were entrusted with a task of protecting her interest and her life made errors of judgement, each on their own accord, and thus passed her sentence. Michael Cartier’s hand might be the one that pulled the trigger and ended her life, but it was the indifference and unprofessionalism of the bureaucratic machine members that allowed him a chance to raise a gun in the first place.
There were many players of the bureaucratic apparatus who played a part in Kristin’s tragic demise, and each of these people was guided by their own reasons, yet the one thing they all do have in common is the fact that, instead of the interests of the victim, they all seemed to have the interests of her abuser at heart. It is him that they expressed concern for, felt sympathy for, it is him they offered assistance to, and did so willingly and eagerly. They were dealing with a person with apparent violent, sadistic, and abusive tendencies, who has multiple times inflicted injury, torture, physical and mental harm upon both people and animals, and yet in their eyes there was still hope that he could ‘get better’, that he could ‘be helped’. And instead of treating him like a dangerous criminal that he was, he was offered chance after chance, even after he clearly had lost a privilege to one.
Whereas, the victim of his abuse, a young woman, an educated and promising young woman at that, a college graduate, who comes from a respectable and healthy household (as opposed to Cartier’s, with an alcoholic father and a teenage mother), was apparently treated as an afterthought in this matter, with a rare exception of some individuals who actually managed to properly do their job. One often hears the reports of what happens when the female victims of rape or other types of abuse come forward with their stories, and they promptly get swept under the rug with the abusers facing little to none penance under the guises of “he is such a promising athlete and/or student” and “why would you ruin a talented young man’s life because of a one small mistake”, and the most tired one, “she asked for it/she provoked him/boys will be boys”.
The tragical irony of the Kristin Lardner case is that this kind of excuse is absolutely irrelevant when it comes to this particular situation. She was a talented artist with a bright future with so much to offer to the world, therefore following the logic of the people using this kind of justifications, she was the one whose interests law enforcement and judiciary had to prioritize. Her safety, her well-being, and her life should have been protected – not the uneducated drug-abusing bouncer’s with no prospects for the future and, in general, use for the society. Yet once more, a man’s interests were put before a woman’s, pure and simple, and it cost a woman her life, which is so often the case. Kristin Lardner was murdered almost 15 years ago, and still little has been done to make the bureaucratic machine more equally attuned to the plight and problems of women. As her father wrote in his recollection of those horrendous events, “I write about it () in anger at a system of justice that failed to protect my daughter, a system that is addicted to looking the other way, especially at the evil done to women” (Lardner, Jr. 1993).
If one tries to trace the origins of bureaucratic negligence that allowed Michael Cartier to remain a free man and commit all the atrocities that he did, one would not have to look too long. Mr. Lardner, Jr. has accumulated plenty of data for even the most casual reader to see where the blame lies. There were several links of the bureaucratic chain that allowed his crimes to go virtually unpunished. In his study, Weber claims that “bureaucratization offers above all the optimum possibility for carrying through the principle of specializing administrative functions according to purely objective considerations” (Weber 1946). Yet there is hardly any objectivity in the fact that, even before Cartier was involved with Kristin, his previous victim, Rose Ryan, did not succeed in getting him to face justice either. Cartier was already on probation, and still he “plea-bargained his way to probation again. () Charges of burglary and cruelty to animals were dismissed; the court saw nothing wrong with putting him back on the street” (Lardner, Jr. 1993). Let us reiterate once more: the court, the primary institution for justice, the institution specifically designated as a part of the bureaucratic machine aimed at defending the innocent and punishing the guilty, saw Michael Cartier, a violent sadist and abuser, fit to continue being a free member of the society. That would be one of the biggest issues with the bureaucracy as it is.
The second important problem that one can observe based on the example of the Kristin Lardner case is the issue of information distribution within the bureaucratic apparatus. According to Weber, “the management of the modern office is based upon written documents (“the files”)” (Weber 1946). This sounds perfectly fine and reasonable, until once again one is faced with the reality of this concept’s application. In Kristin’s case, ‘the files’ meant to facilitate the process of justice in an organized manner offered her little help, for the summons, based on a complaint that charged Cartier with assault and battery, which she filed and Lt. George Finnegan subsequently signed, was never issued. It was still waiting its turn on the desk of clerk-magistrate Connors, effectively lost among other documents, the day the young woman was murdered, three (!) weeks later. Naturally, this calls for a question: how can one trust the bureaucracy when it fails its citizens to such unimaginable degree? Clearly, Weber’s idealist paradigm leaves much to be desired when it comes to real life and the actual experiences of the American people.
References
Weber, M. (1946, 1958, 1973). Essays in Sociology by Max Weber. Oxford University Press,
Inc.
Lardner, Jr., G. (1993). “How Kristin Died”. The Washington Post National Weekly Edition,
