Hypocrisy is a constant when it comes to criminal trials in the news. When the Owens murder happened in Springfield, many people told me they wanted her murderer to be dealt with via mob justice. Liberals wouldn't want this, pointing out how little mob justice has to do with justice and how much it entirely has to do with vengeance. Then, Michael Brown is shot in Ferguson and everybody switches places. Conservatives want due process and a fair trial with the presumption of innocence until proven guilty for Officer Wilson. Liberals have infinite patience for rioters seeking mob justice prepared to blackmail the community with threats of further and worse rioting if the jury does not abandon fairness, impartiality, and the need for evidence in favor of becoming the instrument of the mob's vengeance. News flash. They're all innocent until proven guilty. Our criminal courts are based on the idea that it is better to let ten guilty men walk free than to incarcerate a single innocent one. So the burden of proof is on the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed a crime. You can't support that only when it's not a case you care a lot about. Whether or not someone committed a crime actually matters. How it looks or how you think it is are nothing and certainly are not beyond a reasonable doubt.
The entire point of criminal law in this country is to protect us from one another. There are criminal laws to protect us from ourselves too, but these are laws I despise and that have no legitimate basis. These are not the laws that work people into a frenzy sufficient to result in a desire for mob justice, however. We know the kinds of crimes that can do that well enough that the matter ought need no spelling out. What makes crimes like the Owens case or the Brown case so insidious is that the emotions roused by them are all too understandable and all too human. Of course we want vengeance against a teacher who murders one of his young charges and of course it's horrifying when a policeman shoots and kills a young person, let alone the suspicion and resentment caused by the racial politics of the situation. Understandable though these reactions may be, they present a choice to be made. Does one want vengeance or does one want justice? If you think you can have both, you are sadly mistaken.
To illustrate the point about how mob justice can and does thwart the possibility of achieving actual justice, let me tell you of the happens of an epoch during which I was only a child. At the beginning of the 1980s, a book was published called Michelle Remembers that detailed the childhood experiences of its titular subject being abused and molested by a Satanic cult. Based on the since discredited practice of recovered repressed memories via hypnosis, the book caused the US to see pedophilia as a crime linked with Satanism and the occult. On the one hand, this caused the tragically misguided prosecution of the McMartin preschool, which lasted six years, destroyed the McMartin family, and resulted in no convictions and no remotely convincing evidence. On the other hand, it contributed to the efforts of many, most notably Sinead O'Conner, to bring attention to the very real, systematic, and widespread rape and torture of children in the Catholic Church to fall on death ears. What could be less Satanic, after all, than the most prominent Christian church in the world? So the next time there's a criminal act that makes you as angry as such an act could make a person, do not demand what your clouded mind perceives as justice. Have the patience and sense to insist upon the genuine article.
-Frank
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