Revenge films prevent people being sent to jail
There she was, beaten. Knuckleduster beaten. Face all mashed up, hard to determine what she looked like before the assault, hard to measure what type of person before the act determined what we all think of her. I think she might have looked hard before the incident, but she looked harder after it. Someone said she looked like a “junkie”, as if that description made the whole thing acceptable, normal… with precedent, because such things are, of course, important. We would hate to see violence and not attribute it to the “normalcy”, the precedent, of junkydom, of the hard looking and worryingly thin, the criminal looking.
The young man had approached her, the plain clothed security guard, carrying a hotel’s takings to her utility, and hit her square in the face. It wasn’t a civilised robbery let alone a civil action, but what followed seemed barbaric in its slow deliberation, in the finality of its effect. She followed the man, walking slowly behind him with her hand in her jacket pocket (a chef was watching, was saying “she has a gun, she has a gun”), stoped two meters from the car he sat in and shot through the window.
According to reports he coughed and went into a fit. She aimlessly walked around the car park, bleeding and shocked, asking someone for a cigarette. Someone had screamed. Someone had been beaten. Someone had been shot. The money was safe in its bag. The money wasn’t going anywhere.
Now the talk begins. Should she be charged with murder? No charges have been laid and she isn’t talking. Not to the police. Not to anyone. Seeking legal advice, so the papers tell us, and so she should. Shooting someone, even someone who beat and robbed you, doesn’t walk away of its own accord. The dead follow you, especially if you’re the one that put a bullet in them. That dead man will follow her, guised in a judges robe, draped in the anonymity of a jury, like she followed him, waiting for her to speak, to incriminate, so he can pull the trigger, so he can take in kind what she took from him. Some say death is easier than jail. Some also say it costs the tax payers less.
We’re all talking. Some want her acquitted, not only of any charge that might be laid against her, but also of any responsibility she might bear in the publics mind for the death of a criminal, a violent criminal. Others want her to pay. They say she took it too far, that a beating doesn’t warrant a bullet, doesn’t deserve the annihilating punishment of death. Was the money worth it? Was the broken face worth it? How often have we wondered what the weight of a person’s life? What counterbalance does it offer to their deeds?
I have put the arguments on the scale and found that they are equal in weight. Whatever I add to one side has its opposite, of equal value, that can be added to the other.
He was a violent criminal that received his just desert during the act rather than after it.
She is a murderer that coolly sought vengeance, and found it, after suffering, relative to her punishment, a minor assault.
In his criminality, in the act of his criminality, he had crossed the line that holds on one side the protection of the law and society. He was no longer a member of society and had therefore rescinded his rights and privileges as a member of that civil society.
The woman, while not being responsible for the chain of events that lead to that final, terrible act, is responsible for that act. She did not choose to be the victim (and victimised she was) but she did choose how to react to being a victim.
It is not the woman’s fault but the fault of an industry (the security industry) that provides weapons to people barely trained to use them. An industry that expects a police-like response from a person who was trained over a weekend; who would hardly ever encounter a situation requiring training or skill; who, when in the face of deadly novelty, would react in novel and deadly ways, like shooting a man after following him to his car, after being beaten with a knuckleduster.
The tabloids want an easy answer and I suspect they’ll find it in history. There have been at least four recent cases of people killing criminals while being the victims of crime. All four were acquitted or never charged. We live in a city where crime is growing in visibility if not in actuality or statistically. We want someone to pay and the courts can be slow and inconsistent.
Case in point – four gang rapists might be let free, their victim called in for the third time to testify. Another mistrial because the defendants refused legal representation the first time around. She doesn't testify, they go free. A gun and a spluttering death seems just in comparison.
Death is the one jail cell you can’t walk out of on a technicality.