On June 10, 1991, 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped on her way to school in South Lake Tahoe, Calif. Today, the whole world pretty much knows what happened after that. Two heads-up UC Berkeley police employees cracked the case on instinct alone last month, with Dugard and her daughters Angel and Starlet thrust into the spotlight. Dugard and the girls, apparently fathered by Dugard’s rapist, are the central figures in a grisly, almost otherworldly tale of captivity, slavery and, happily, joyous reunion. Phillip Garrido and his wife Nancy allegedly held Dugard and her daughters in their Antioch backyard for 18 years, a compound of tents and heavy flora shielding them from view. There’s been some talk about bad police work surrounding that arrangement, chiefly in the person of an officer who didn’t inspect the lay of Garrido’s land as judiciously as the law allows. That allegation, along with several others inside the mountain of paperwork this matter will generate (including the suspicion that Garrido killed as many as 10 prostitutes), will play itself out in due course, with as ideal a result as Dugard’s rescue itself. But there’s a bigger issue at work here — that of the justice society will exact from the Garridos, who as two weeks ago were on suicide watch at the Contra Costa County jail in Martinez. As things stand, they could face multiple life sentences on 29 felony charges. Meanwhile, one newspaper reported that they may be subject to the death penalty. And although that information is inaccurate, it does spark a certain concept of just deserts in the minds and hearts of an outraged public. I’ve always been pretty liberal in my sociopolitical views — the way I see it, you only go around once, and I’d prefer a far less provincialized society around me to that end. Capital punishment, however, is an issue I take a certain heed on, because we’re supposedly a society of laws and not of men. It’s absolutely true that no person has the right to sit in judgment of another, especially in matters of life and death — which is why we have 12 jurors, not one, and a series of alternates to hear most criminal cases. Moreover, we have decades of trial and error and an avalanche of documentation in our attempts to conform the punishment to the crime; even after all that, capital punishment still stands as a legal consequence in many quarters for the most heinous offenses. I’ve been thinking about Jaycee’s case a lot because it touches so close to home. Recently, someone very dear to me was horrifically injured at the hands of an ex-boyfriend whose jealousy had inexplicably turned militant. Her recovery is proceeding miraculously; the perp is in for the judicial ride of his life. There’s a small, sick part of me that wishes him the gravest of ill in the days ahead — but in this society of laws, governance must come first. It’s the nature of that governance that may bear new scrutiny. Plea bargains, prison overcrowding, milquetoast judges, confusion over legal rights and responsibilities in the Internet age: All seem to erode the rule of law, under which we enjoy a greater degree of freedom than without it. Dugard’s ordeal is an ideal case in point. Garrido broke the law, it’s said, by holding her captive for nearly 20 years, during which she may never have seen the light of day. If the Garridos (and my gunman) are found guilty, society will have sanctioned what everybody’s thinking: that they deserve society’s retribution under the fullest extent of the law. I’m just not so sure the fullest extent is full enough. That decades-long trial-and-error routine featured escalated sanctions amid varying degrees of offense. Likewise, maybe it’s time to revisit the capital punishment phenomenon, framing it as a last-resort declaration of our better selves. — Martin Jones Westlin is the editor of San Diego Downtown News, a sister publication to the Village News.