By Anne Kim
“So do you have a gun?” I doubt this is a question asked of most
people, but it is one I heard relatively often in my travels abroad.
Once people found out I was from New York, it was the inevitable
follow-up question. Guns are used on both sides of the law, but there
are more than two sides to justice. Vigilante justice strikes a chord
with many people because it speaks to their sense of what is right in
the face of a legal system fraught with deficiencies. See Michael
Kanatake’s “A Sympathetic Killer (12/27/2009); “Do Sinners Really Make
the Best Saints?” (12/9/2009).
I recently saw “Shooter,” an action movie based on Stephen Hunter’s
book “Point of Impact.” Bob Lee Swagger is a former U.S. Marine Corps
sniper who is coaxed out of isolation to help prevent an assassination
attempt on the President. The Ethiopian archbishop is killed instead,
and his death is masked as a botched assassination attempt on the
President, for which Swagger is framed. A U.S. Senator and a U.S.
Colonel authorized a conspiracy to kill the archbishop in order to
prevent disclosure of the village genocide that they spearheaded.
Swagger eventually proves his innocence, but when he produces evidence
of the Colonel’s involvement in the genocide, the Attorney General’s
hands are tied by the law. The Colonel laughs as he points out the
legal loophole – the genocide took place in Ethiopia, which is outside
American jurisdiction. As the Colonel saunters out, the Attorney
General says to him, “Your moral compass is so f***ed up, I’ll be
shocked if you manage to find your way back to the parking lot.” The
scene ends with the Attorney General saying that justice doesn’t
always prevail in the world they live in because, “it’s not the Wild
West where you can clean up the streets with a gun, even though
sometimes it’s exactly what is needed.” He then announces that Swagger
is free to go.
Movies and books reveal more than just the cold, hard facts and make
us sympathetic to the plight of a person forced to go rogue. One of
the themes we discussed in our Law and Literature class was the
inability and unwillingness of the court to look past frontage to a
defendant’s back story, which may have a palliative or exonerative
effect on a case. These underlying considerations do not always excuse
the legally criminal actions that ensue, nor do they give them license
to mete out their own form of justice when the systems fails, but when
true criminals escape through loopholes or on technicalities, we are
left in a moral quandary. While there is a constant struggle between
abiding by the law and going outside legally-sanctioned methods to
find justice, the popularity of vigilantes in television shows and
movies (Dexter, Taxi Driver) evidence support by the general
population. Whether ratings and ticket sales reflect approval that
transfers to real life is another question. When taken out of the
romanticized world of fiction, does vigilante justice still have a
proper place in the world?
