I'm guessing a fair few of you know that it's based on a true event. I'd be willing to bet that even less of you know that just yesterday, the man who orchestrated the killings, now eighty years old, a Baptist preacher and wheelchair bound, was found guilty of manslaughter and sent down for twenty years.
Here, I present an article that was submitted to the open forums of the San Francisco Chronicle. They're not my words and I claim no tolerance for the attitude displayed by the author, Hans Allhoff, a student of Stanford Law School. I'm reproducing it in full because I don't want it to dissappear. If you want a more clear explanation with what's wrong with the US today, just read on:
It's the kind of news we love to hear: Forty-one years after three voter registration volunteers were killed in rural Mississippi, Edgar Ray Killen, an acknowledged Klu Klux Klansman, now stands trial for their murder. Again. (Killen was tried in 1967 and walked after his all-white jury deadlocked.) His alleged victims were James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. Each was in his early 20s, and each was a passionate advocate for what he understood justice to demand.
Although Killen has pled not guilty, his prosecution may well do for civil-rights soldiers still living what apprehending Osama bin Laden would do for us, which is to bring some symbolic closure to a haunting memory. Yet I am surprised nobody wants to call Killen a murderer and then leave him alone: Our two most preferred justifications for punishing criminals -- incapacitation and deterrence -- don't cut it in his case. He is 80 years old and a preacher. By virtue of his station in life (an accident earlier this year left him wheelchair-bound), he is already incapacitated. He might still be a racist, but he is no real threat to social order. What's more, his crime, by virtue of our society's moral evolution, is one we don't really need to deter. Civil- rights work is a relatively safe business these days.
There's always a need to deter senseless killing, of course, but there was nothing senseless about what Killen is accused of. Whoever did it was a Klu Klux Klan member who, true to his heart, was fighting for his version of a better America. Just like his victims. Sad -- disgusting, even -- but true.
With incapacitation and deterrence ineligible, what's left? Not rehabilitation. Again, Killen is not far from death, and criminal convictions only rarely produce heartfelt conversions in people. How about vengeance, or retribution? They're terribly unpopular. One victim's mother, Carolyn Goodman, has specifically disavowed their import. "I'm not looking for revenge," she said. "I'm looking for justice."
Most opponents of harsh punishment and strict sentencing laws also believe vengeance and retribution to be subrational impulses, simply out of alignment with modern liberal and democratic values. George Ryan, who commuted all death sentences in Illinois when he was governor, continues to say they have no penal logic -- to much applause.
Yet if we're to ignore our moral impressions about what people who commit crimes deserve, irrespective of what we'll gain socially by punishing them, it's not clear how we can in good faith prosecute people like Killen. Carolyn Goodman is partially correct. We all want justice. But it's hard to see how our understanding of justice in Killen's case has nothing to do with wanting to see him suffer. We don't just want him to be held accountable for his crime; we want him to pay a price for it. We believe it would be morally proper for him to die in jail rather than his Mississippi home.
We may be a better, more civil people without vengeful sentiments in our hearts. Maybe they do coarsen us. Maybe they aren't good for our moral advancement as a people. Maybe it is wrong to treat people, even bad people, as objects of punishment.
Whether Killen should be prosecuted today for a crime of decades past can remain an open question. What cannot is our reason for believing he should. It is vengeance, and nothing else.
Pay especial attention to this phrase:
there was nothing senseless about what Killen is accused of. Whoever did it was a Klu Klux Klan member who, true to his heart, was fighting for his version of a better America.
Now, even though the author goes on to call such an attitude sad and disgusting, we all know that there are people both in the states and much closer to home who will say that it's a fair point. Hypocritically, they would probably be the loudest voices in the crowd baying for the blood of all Muslims as a result of 9/11.
Maybe this is an attempt at Devils' Advocacy, maybe it's all a badly thought out exercise in reasoning by some snotty Law undergrad student, but it's sparked a row, it's tapped the uneasy subconscious of Americans because it's reawakened the thought that maybe, just maybe America isn't all that Great and Free after all. And that scares the living fuck out of them.
