The Red Mist and Restorative Justice
This is a guest blog by Angie Kaye, a Senior Restorative Justice Facilitator for prisons in the Thames Valley area for 12 years.
On 26th May last year, Paul Doyle drove his car through the victory celebrations of Liverpool football fans. 131 people were injured. He was sentenced to 21 years for using his car as “a weapon in a moment of rage. He got angrier and angrier…he just clearly got red mist.”
DCI Fitzgerald said “I do not believe that Doyle deliberately set out his journey to injure people on that day, but his actions were deliberate.”
The ‘red mist’ is a term that Restorative Justice practitioners hear often in crimes of violence, domestic abuse, road rage and murder. How do victims of crime respond to this explanation, and how can the restorative process help them in these cases?
The Psychology and the Law
A condition known as IED (Intermittent Explosive Disorder) describes having frequent episodes of anger out of all proportion to the event that triggers them. A common example is road rage, when another driver gives someone the “finger”. The impulsive aggressive outburst is not pre-meditated.
IED may be associated with damage or lesions in the pre-frontal cortex, or a hyperreactive amygdala. Other research has linked it to inadequate serotonin regulation, all of which diminishes a person’s ability to predict the impact of their actions.
A man who killed his wife in 2001 claimed in court that he “boiled over,” and therefore wasn’t guilty of murder. He described how “a red mist” had come over him when his wife told him that she was leaving him, taking the children and moving in with another man. The court accepted his plea and he was sentenced to only 4 years in prison. Today we would call this “victim blaming”: “She made me do it.”
Should the “Red Mist” descending be used as a mitigating factor in law? For 300 years criminal courts regarded sexual infidelity as sufficiently “red misty” to reduce a charge of murder to one of manslaughter. That idea of diminished responsibility due to provocation spilled over into cases of wounding, GBH, and attempted murder.
However, in recent years judges have been less tolerant of the defence of provocation, while simply claiming a temporary loss of control through sudden anger is also regarded with less sympathy by the courts.
The Victims’ Response
How do victims respond to the ‘red mist’ defence, which may include the offender saying they didn’t intend harm, or were provoked? Initially, not well! It may be felt by victims as denial of responsibility, and therefore accountability. Also it smacks of insincerity, amounting to a diminishing of the harm caused, which undermines and devalues the victim’s own lived experience. Listening to the accounts of victims of Doyle’s maniacal drive in Liverpool is a salutary experience: many feel that although we can all acknowledge having ‘lost it’ on some occasions, it doesn’t result in reckless harming of others.
At its most extreme this defence can be seen as a form of victim blaming, claiming it was the victim’s actions that triggered the loss of control (common in cases of domestic violence). Shifting the blame this way can result in re-victimisation.
Above all, victims may feel that their real suffering is being invalidated, as the defence of a red mist all too easily explains away the offence as merely an accident, or a momentary lapse of reason. In the restorative process, victims often want to know “Why me?”, so when the harm to them is downgraded in this way, it can undermine the search for understanding and closure.
The Role of RJ in these Cases
Given these natural responses, how could a restorative process even get underway, let alone be successful?
Here’s a case that illustrates how meaningful progress can be made even in these situations. We’re in the world of road rage again…
Barry and Fatima* were driving home when they inadvertently cut up another driver, Steve. The van driven by Steve pulled up next to them at the traffic lights. He swore at them, and drove very close to their car in an intimidating way.
Steve then followed them home, and when they got out of their car he assaulted and beat up Barry, who suffered life-changing injuries.
After sentencing and imprisonment, Steve reached out to our RJ service. I went to see him; he said he took full responsibility, but explained that at the time of the offence he was in a bad state of mind due to debts.
“A fancy car cut me up – I just saw red and lost control. I don’t know what came over me.” I questioned him extensively, but he always came back to the same excuse.
Barry did not want to attend the RJ Conference, but Fatima did, even though I had told her Steve’s ‘explanation’ for his loss of control. In the meeting Fatima spoke about her fears, as well as the harm caused to both her family and Barry by the attack.
She asked Steve if he had lost his temper before. He said ‘yes’, many times. In his turn, Steve asked her if she had also experienced losing her temper. Fatima said that she had, but hadn’t lost control or harmed others as a result. Steve was silent for a while: Fatima’s point may seem obvious, but in the charged atmosphere of the conference, it was as if it had registered with Steve for the first time.
The conversation deepened. Fatima asked him if his frequent outbursts of temper had affected his life? He spoke, haltingly at first but then more clearly, about its negative impact on his family and work life. He told her he was planning to seek help, and had signed up for a course on anger management. He was also starting to read about the behavioural science behind his tendency to lose control of his emotions.
This was highly significant to Fatima. Not simply because she’d had the opportunity to explain the considerable harm she and her husband had been subjected to, but also she felt a sense of agency in the dialogue with Steve. She believed she could contribute to a more positive future where others would be less likely to suffer as she had. She asked to be kept informed of Steve’s progress, and told me she left ‘feeling a ton lighter.’
Why RJ Works, Despite an Imperfect World
Fatima’s story underlines that the RJ journey can have great value for victims, even when it looks as if the offender is ‘copping out’ by saying they couldn’t control their own emotions. You don’t need a perfect start for the process to work. Unlike the binary nature of the criminal justice system – guilty or not guilty – Restorative Justice is more complex and nuanced.
Unfortunately we have created risk-averse systems that have prevented many well informed victims – like Fatima – from experiencing the benefits of restoring at least some of the harm they have endured.
I’m often told by the bureaucrats who run the service that we don’t want to re-victimise people. But in my experience this is much more likely to happen in the criminal process, rarely in a well-assessed RJ intervention. The victims have already suffered serious harm, and don’t need over-protection when they seek the relief and redress that RJ can provide. There are currently many victims who are not being allowed access to Restorative Justice, their requests disappearing into an administrative black hole, ‘for their own protection.’
The biggest risk is not to risk, and to leave victims without the hope and empowerment they deserve. They know what they want, and it’s their voices we should listen to. Even in ‘red mist’ situations…
