PRESUMED INNOCENT?

Bureaucratic Screw Up (Robert Lane Greene, 06.03.03, New Republic)

So, having knocked Saddam from power, it turns out that America may have done so for the wrong reasons. But imagine this, a scenario a thoughtful antiwar friend posed to me before the war: Your neighbor, you have good reason to believe but cannot definitively prove, has purchased weapons that could be used against your family. You further believe, based on his history of violence, that he's prone to using them. (He's been arrested on a few aggravated assault charges over the years.) Would your going over and killing him be immoral, given your thin evidence? Possibly. But what if, upon having dispatched him, you find in his home grotesque evidence that he was a serial murderer, and that his victims had included his own family--meaning his capacity for violence is much deeper than even you suspected. You may initially feel guilt for having attacked him for the wrong reasons. But in the end, you have killed a vile murderer who would otherwise have escaped justice, perhaps to kill again. Are you a dangerous vigilante, or a hero?

This question isn't easy. Western ideas of justice are based on the presumption of innocence, so it must not be suggested lightly that governments be overthrown because we merely suspect them of wrongdoing.

For the analogy to be apt a few changes are necessary: your neighbor is acknowledged by all concerned to be a mass murderer, though some maintain he's reformed himself; he's tried in the past, and you believe he's continuing, to acquire weapons that will allow him to murder many more, maybe even you; all acknowledge that he continues to terrorize his family; he's agreed to allow you to search his house, to patrol around it, and to improve his treatment of the residents of the house, but broken all three promises, including shooting at you when you're on patrol. Despite all this, fellow neighbors wish to ignore the situation. You take matters into your own hands. It turns out he hadn't gotten the weapons to kill you, but every other element of the scenario that you feared turns out to be true, unsurprisingly since most of it was uncontested. Regrets? Posted by Orrin Judd at June 6, 2003 1:04 AM