This is the second time in as many years that something remarkably similar has happened, and it's starting to feel like a bad rerun. There's a national outcry over a young black man being killed by a "white man" (as he's almost invariably described). Of course, killing a person isn't always a crime; there are defenses to murder. Yet it seems as if the nation just needs to see him convicted and sent to prison. But that can only happen through a legal process. And when the case is commenced not under the usual standards, but under political pressure, it turns out to be a weak case, and there's no conviction.
All good people are supposed to understand that this is not just a tragedy, but a national tragedy. Somehow, it's supposed to be particularly tragic when a black man is killed by a white man. And many look to the legal system as if it existed to provide therapeutic relief to the whole country. When that doesn't happen, after all the talk about how the defendant symbolizes this country's problems with race, the legal result strikes some people as so outrageous that they riot, harming innocent people and casting whatever political movement they might represent in the worst possible light.
We need to think more carefully about the way we elevate a single criminal case into something that's supposed to take on larger meaning, resonate throughout the country, and resolve lingering, longstanding national wounds. This approach is highly likely not to work out, and to backfire.
I work on a lot of felony cases; many are murder cases. I regularly see cases that feel just as important to me as any case I see in the news. They feel anything but routine. They contain so much vivid detail and emotion and meaning, that it can be jarring to stop and think that this was an everyday occurrence. Only a few people paid any attention to it, and everyone else went about their business. I don't understand why the 1-in-a-million case becomes a cause célèbre, when other cases of horrible crimes don't. The fact that the alleged perpetrator was white and the alleged victim was black in the cases we care about, and there was a different racial configuration in most of the cases we don't care about, would seem to be a very poor criterion. It's certainly not a reason to reach a national consensus that a man is guilty before we've afforded him due process.
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
The cycle of cause célèbres
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5 comments:
"We need to think more carefully about the way we elevate a single criminal case into something that's supposed to take on larger meaning, resonate throughout the country, and resolve lingering, longstanding national wounds."
More importantly, we need to expose the process by which activists select cases to exploit.
Indeed, this case was not randomly selected. The shooting of Michael Brown occurred way back on August 4. The election occurred November 4, and the riots are happening afterward, not before.
The timing is significant. The NYT reported that some of the national leaders met with President Obama on November 5, the day after election day. However, we can safely assume that the activists were contacted and the appointment to meet was made weeks beforehand -- you don't just walk up to the White House and get a meeting with the President the same day.
Somebody decided that staging the riots way before the election would have made the Democrat blowout on election day much worse. The expedient course would be to stage them after the election.
This is obviously what was done. And the President's apparent involvement in the selection of the victim (as opposed to all the other young unarmed black men shot by police that summer) and the date of the protest makes me wonder if the people of Ferguson, Missouri had their Seventh Amendment rights violated. IANAL, and it may just be an old-fashioned 20th century notion, but I don't think that the government should be involved in the planning of riots. The federal government should compensate the riot victims.
We need to think more carefully about the way we elevate a single criminal case into something that's supposed to take on larger meaning, resonate throughout the country, and resolve lingering, longstanding national wounds.
@Jaltcoh, I think I see where Scott is coming from, and I have to say that I agree. What if people already are thinking very carefully about the way that they elevate a single criminal case into a cause celebre? What if they're deliberately picking cases that are open-and-shut cases of white men killing young black men in self defense?
The media keeps wanting a Man bites dog, but they always seem to end up with dog bites Man.
The Althouse blog highlighted a NYT article where the reporters were working very hard to obscure the "human agency" of the events in Ferguson. The media is not reporting the "who" in order to shed a false light on the "why." This wasn't grass roots, it was Astroturf; and if the government was involved to any degree in staging it, the victims of the Ferguson riots need to be compensated.
"We need to think more carefully about the way we elevate a single criminal case into something that's supposed to take on larger meaning, resonate throughout the country, and resolve lingering, longstanding national wounds."
As the old joke goes, "What do you mean 'we,' White Man?"
I agree that there are people who try to "elevate a single criminal case into something that's supposed to take on larger meaning" and "resonate throughout the country."
I'm don't see much reliable evidence that their goal is "resolving lingering, longstanding national wounds."
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