Somewhere in the wreckage of Jane Radostits’ Chevrolet Impala is a window into how we judge others.
Few recent stories are as glumly provocative as that of Radostits, a DuPage County prosecutor whose blood-alcohol level was three times the legal limit when she died May 11 in a head-on collision. She was 46, a mother of two, a 2005 state “prosecutor of the year” and known for high-profile cases. Among them: The prosecution of an Aurora drunken driver in the deaths of three high school students and another woman.
Inevitably, initial responses — including mine — were rife with the irony of the event, as well as what a suburban newspaper editorial called “painful questions.”
That editorial wondered about the actions of colleagues during an apparently boozy lunch the day of the crash, including the person who drove Radostits back to her car at the courthouse (and subsequently announced his own departure for private practice).
The editorial might also have mused, but didn’t, about Radostits’ boss, State’s Atty. Joseph Birkett. A man whose public career exhibits no shortage of moral certitude, especially on the issue of the death penalty, Birkett said his assistant had led a “great life and mistakes can be made.”
That’s a concession Birkett seems disinclined to make regarding criminal defendants his office prosecutes.
Would Birkett really have sought the same tough justice he reflexively favors if Radostits had survived the crash, especially if the 36-yearold single mom in the SUV she collided with had not? Would a local judge have really thrown the book at her, as with the Aurora motorist who got 13 years in prison?
A large citizenry suspects that law enforcers don’t always get treated the way others do and that a sense of entitlement or even impunity can mark the guardians of our laws.
Ultimately, however, Radostits’ death raises the tricky question of how we assess the nexus of professional performance and private conduct — and what, if anything, such analyses say not only about the people we judge, but also about ourselves.
A simple, obvious truth was voiced by author-lawyer Scott Turow, a one-time federal prosecutor who has had galling experiences with DuPage County justice relating to a notorious death penalty case in which his client was exonerated. (“Ten years ago, at least,’ Turow observed about DuPage County prosecutors, “they were as morally arrogant as any group on the face of the Earth.”)
“Prosecutors are human beings. They screw up like everyone else,” Turow said. Yet he cites a “self-conscious decision” during his days on the government payroll not to err in categories of life he prosecuted. He didn’t agree with certain drug laws on the books but followed them, not granting himself personal leeway.
That helps explain his reaction to Radostits’ last lunch, namely: “You wonder how somebody let her get back into the car.”
Some of us might instantly hark back to similar social situations, then breathe a retroactive sigh of relief that calamity did not follow our aiding and abetting a chum.
Michael Josephson,who provides ethics advice to many industries and groups, from cops to sports editors, discerns a lesson of a different sort that partly reflects what he has seen during joint efforts of his Josephson Institute of Ethics in Los Angeles and the antidrug Drug Abuse Resistance Education program — namely that DARE officers have been busted.
In Josephson’s mind, Radostits’ death underscores the importance of her work prosecuting drunken drivers.
“See, look what happens!” he said.
Yet the rush to cite the “irony” of the prosecutor’s death plays to “an overly simplistic, white hat/black hat notion,” Josephson said. All heroes have flaws, all villains have virtues.
“Was she an alcoholic? Was there a family tragedy in the background?” he asked, a reminder that key realities may not be known publicly. Exhibit compassion, he counseled, but don’t forget that “even with compassion, this was a horrible act.”
That hints at a reality that even if we try not to characterize Radostits by her last, and perhaps worst, act, her unavoidable legacy may be virtually set in asphalt: “Tough-minded prosecutor who committed same crime she prosecuted.”
Kenneth Vaux, a professor of theological ethics at Garrett- Evangelical Theological Seminary at Northwestern University, counsels us to look more closely in the mirror.
“I’m not surprised by the reactions,” Vaux said. “It’s always the case that those deeply at fault project rectitude. It’s the story of our country, and all of us in the professions, journalism, theologians, etc. We project rectitude since we know our failings.”
Aggravating matters may be the lack of any inclination or mechanism to say, “Mea culpa,” or, as Vaux puts it, “to preface our moral judgments by saying that I too am at fault and have no real claim on righteousness to judge.”
“Society demands we project rectitude, but we all know how fallible we are,” Vaux said. “It’s why judges wear black robes, to signal their finitude and limitations. The same with clergy. People must be reminded of our flaws.”
For Colin Greer, a Scottish educator and president of the New York-based New World Foundation, the matter goes beyond conceding weakness. He believes we have an incessant impulse to idealize, namely to project onto people the best things we want for ourselves, and when disappointed, to project onto people all the bad things we fear about ourselves, often leading to anger and disappointment.
“The way we respond denies the complexity of life,” Greer said. “The only thing new here is probably the speed of modern media and its tendency to exaggerate — and to caricature individuals, he said.
Finally, there is a matter not as profound as our reflex to simplify or to pretend we’re godlike. It’s one found throughout the Tribune series “Teens at the Wheel.” It’s alcohol.
You need not be a temperance league member to conclude that as a society, we’re bollixed up over booze. All the advertising linking drinking with being youthful, hip, athletic and vibrant. All those teen practitioners of the fine art of fake IDs. All those winks, nods and humor from adults about those who are over-served.
We still head to the bar car on trains or have a few shots as we await passage on ferries transporting us and our cars to dry land; and then, seamlessly, we get behind the wheel.
My hands aren’t clean; at least, they weren’t before my 3- year-old was born. I won’t visit upon him previous delusions about my self-discipline after a few pops. Yes, life’s full of nuance, I grant, though some things seem pretty straightforward.
Having at least three lemon martinis and perhaps a light beer with appetizers, as Radostits did at an Oak Brook restaurant, then driving a car more than 80 m.p.h. in a 45 m.p.h. zone?
Even theologians who own up to personal failings might have to declare that as just plain dumb.
———-
jcwarren@tribune.com
