99. Of two minds

Last Tuesday my local paper, the Albuquerque Journal (whose webpage is subscription-only), published two letters to the editor on the same page.  One began: "New Mexico is a lawless society."  The other complained that the installation of red-light cameras "eliminated due process, which is guaranteed to us by the Bill of Rights."

Which is worse, breaking the law or enforcing it in a particular manner?  It's not a new question.  Londoners of the 1830s asked themselves the same thing, as shown in Sarah Wise's wonderful glimpse into underworld London, The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London.   (The original title of the book is a tad less lurid.)

The London of the day was indeed a lawless society - perhaps even more so than today's New Mexico, if "lawless" is a relative rather than absolute condition.  The main thread of Wise's story - which is social history built on the scaffold of a case history that ends on a different kind of scaffold - tells the story of a couple resurrectionists who, perhaps inspired by Burke and Hare themselves (here's a contemporary account), burked at least a couple victims, selling the corpses to the most respectable surgeons of the great city for anatomical studies.

It was not a good idea to be a vulnerable person on the London streets of the 1830s.  Unattached women and children were particularly at risk.  After authorities recovered the body of the so-called Italian boy - an overly-fresh corpse offered to a surgical hospital - they asked parents of missing children to view the body, in hopes that someone might be able to give the dead child a name.  

As Wise reports, "The number of anxious parents who had come to see the young boy's body in the Covent Garden watch house, and the tales of loss they told, had amazed the coroner, his jury, the magistrates, and the parish authorities of St. Paul's."   Eight sets of parents came forward, including the parents of a deaf boy (the deaf have always been particularly vulnerable to criminal violence).

Wise reprints a heartbreaking sample of notices printed in the papers:

In the month of March last, Mrs. Hughes, a widow, of No 5, Paradise Place, Frog Lane, Islington, went out one morning to wash, leaving, as was her custom, her little boy at home; and on her return in the evening he was missing, and she has never heard of him since.  ...

[A] boy about nine years of age, the son of a poor woman at Poplar ... was at play with his little brother in the street, and told him that a man had promised him such lots of sugar - a great many basins full - and that he would bring him some when he came back.  He then left his brother and has never returned.

The Weekly Dispatch carried this item: "Among the supposed victims to the 'interests of science' who have disappeared lately is a younth named Smith, about seventeen years of age, the son of respectable but unfortunate people in Grove Place, Camden Town. ...  He left his father's house on business last Tuesday evening, dressed in a blue coat and dark trousers, and has not been seen or heard of since."

Wise reports that the Morning Advertiser "gave regular bulletins of missing children: Caroline Brand, eight, of Wolverley Street, Hackney Road, sent out by her parents to sell bundles of firewood one evening and not seen again, just as her thirteen-year-old brother had disappeared, five months before; and Henry Borroff, a five-year-old, of Barton Court, Hoxton Old Town - gone."

(Pardon me for my uncharitable suspicions, but I think an invitation to Mr. and Mrs. Brand to come down to the stationhouse for separate videotaped interviews might not have been entirely out of order.)

But even as stories of children kidnapped by beggars or murdered by body-snatchers were selling newspapers, Londoners resisted fiercely the creation of the Metropolitan Police - the original bobbies or peelers.  As Wise recounts,

Hostility was also expressed toward attempts to put any Englishman under state surveillance - a distinctly foreign concept, it was believed, that would imperil the freedom of the individual.  There were fears that Peel's New Police would be a militaristic body, placing the country at the mercy of thousands of uniformed petty despots, acting as they wished with full government backing. ...

From the moment of their formation the Metropolitan Police encountered tremendous resistance.  Contempt for Peel's Bloody Gang, Peel's Private Army, the Blue Devils, the Plague of Blue Locusts permeated the whole of London society.  The antipathy was as deeply felt in the drawing rooms of the West End as it was in the capital's "flash houses" - pubs and taverns where stolen goods were fenced and new robberies plotted.  Many among the middle classes wondered whether the arrival of the New Police was simply the first in a line of measures to restrict an Englishman's liberty; even an Englishwoman's liberty was at risk.

Wise then reprints one of those inimitably English letters to the editor of the Times - no other nationality, or perhaps no other newspaper's readership, can combine stuffiness with indignation in quite the same way - deploring the rounding up of prostitutes on the Quadrant, Regent Street (a pretty high class of streetwalkers, one would gather) who had refused a bobby's command to disperse:

I have observed lately various instances of the same illegal and arbitrary conduct.  I am no patroniser of disorderly persons of any class or description, but if our personal liberty is of any value, and is not to be at the mercy of every insolent policeman, I should wish to know by what legal authority this very constitutional force assumes to itself the power of seizing and imprisoning any woman, disorderly or not, who does not choose to leave the streets at their command. 

"If our personal liberty is of any value"?  The same my-way-or-the-highway-to-hell rhetoric is heard every day in American criminal cases.  Here's the concluding paragraph from a Mississippi Court of Appeals judge's dissent in a case involving a defendant who shot a man four times while the man (admittedly, it would seem, not an altogether nice man) worked on his car stereo:

It is tragic in this case that a human life was lost for nothing, but it would be even more tragic if the rule of law was not adhered to, for a failure to adhere to the rule of law imperils the existence of both our nation and the freedoms which it offers. I believe adherence to the rule of law requires that Knox's conviction be set aside as offending the constitutional provision against Double Jeopardy.

It's "even more tragic" to punish a murderer than to murder?  (The dissenting judge didn't question the defendant's guilt - double jeopardy has nothing to do with guilt or innocence.)  At least the Times letter writer of 1832, with his Latinate periods, didn't say that "adherence to the rule of law" required that people be permitted to gun each other down without consequence.

Comments

[me-mo]

Regarding the following quote

It's "even more tragic" to punish a murderer than to murder? (The dissenting judge didn't question the defendant's guilt - double jeopardy has nothing to do with guilt or innocence.) At least the Times letter writer of 1832, with his Latinate periods, didn't say that "adherence to the rule of law" required that people be permitted to gun each other down without consequence.

I would suggest that the judge is a rule utilitarian, rather than an act utilitarian. A good primer is given at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism