ABSTRACT
As its critics are quick to point out, one defect of vigilante justice is its tendency to prefer speedy punishments to the more rational and tedious process of obtaining the best possible information that may be admissible as evidence in a court trial. Consequently, as Jimmy Marcus (in the film Mystic River) discovers the morning after he has killed Dave Boyle, sometimes the wrong man dies for the wrong crime. Pauline Kael summed this problem up in her comments on Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films. “What makes Harry the sharpshooter a great cop,” Kael says sarcastically,
is he knows the guilty from the innocent, and in this action world there’s only one thing to be done with the guilty-kill them. Alternatives to violence are automatically excluded. If we talk to Harry, if after he dispatches his thirty-fifth or eightieth criminal one of us says ‘Harry, could you maybe ask the guy’s name before you shoot to make sure you got the right man?’ Harry’s answer has to be ‘all criminals are liars anyway,’ as he pulls the trigger. Because that’s what he wants to do, pull the trigger.
