He's a Criminal

Back when I was learning German in Vienna the war to the East in the former Yugoslavia was raging. Slobodan Milosevic, who led Serbia in those years was charged with war crimes. As we learned by conversing about politics I opined in German, “Milosevic is evil.” A Serb in the class took exception. “No, he is a criminal” he replied. 

I’ve thought about that. He had a point. 

We humans don’t have the capacity to judge who is good and evil. Or more properly the judgment I rendered on Slobodan Milosevic is one that could be made of every human being. “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” As soon as we use the language of good and evil for others we have invited and we deserve our own condemnation. 

What is within our capacity as humans is to make human laws, set up processes by which we determine who has broken them, and determine the consequences for the criminal. And what we’ve discovered over millennia is that the way to do this is through a democratic government. We elect law makers. We set up through democratic means the processes by which guilt and innocence is determined. And we determine how the guilty are punished, ideally by a jury of peers of both criminal and victim. 

In doing this we forfeit to society as a whole our personal right and capacity to determine guilt and innocence and to execute punishment. We affirm, as is aptly proven, that society as a whole is a better judge of what is right and what is wrong and a better judge of who is a criminal and who is not than any one member of society or any group within society. 

Of course we don’t give up our right to our opinion. But we give up the right to act on it, or indeed to even assert it as a public truth. Put more bluntly. You may believe that the results of a trial are wrong, and that a man is innocent or a woman is guilty. But even you should question your own judgment. Your fellow citizens have told you that you are wrong. What makes you so informed, intelligent, and insightful that you should question their judgment? 

This is why it was wrong for an investigator in the Amber Guyger trial to assert publicly that she committed no crime. Society has given him no power to make such a judgment, and indeed his mere assertion of his belief while an official of the state is improper. This is why it is wrong for the press or community leaders or indeed Jean Botham’s family to assert that she is guilty. Society gives them no power to make such a judgment. 

The same is true, of course, when it comes to the President. His guilt or innocence isn’t some kind of disembodied fact which anyone can see and assert. It comes into being when a judgment is rendered by whichever court is appropriate under the Constitution. 

And this is why obstruction of justice is the most serious crime. It is a direct attack on the whole democratic society and that society's will expressed in the processes by which guilt and innocence are determined. Equally serious is vigilanteism, which likewise directly attacks the whole of society.  

If this seems hard we must bear in mind in mind the alternative, which we see played out daily across the world: chaos and violence. 

There is a story in the Bible. It ends the Book of Judges and is called the story of the Levite’s Concubine. (Judges 19 - 21) The story begins with bad judgments by humans who should know better. It quickly escalates to rape and murder. And then to genocide. And fratricide. And finally is “resolved” through mass rape. The final line of the story. “And the people did what was right in their own eyes.” 

Slobodan Milosevic wasn’t evil, or at least no human can make that judgment. He wasn’t even a criminal because a young man declared him such in a German class 20 years ago. He was a criminal because he was tried in an International Court whose jurisdiction his own state recognized and was found to be guilty of specific crimes in international law. And the law he broke? Under his protection and within territories he governed “people did what was right in their own eyes.”  And that is the death of society and indeed of humanity. It cannot be borne.