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THE LAW IS A ASS for 09/04/2001
DOCKET ENTRY
"The Law is a Ass" Installment # 110
Originally written as installment # 100 and published in Comics Buyer's Guide issue # 692, February 20, 1987 issue
One hundred columns. (The numbering is off, because I've written several original columns for the web page, so it's numbering won't match the numbering of the Comics Buyer's Guide columns. But this was the one hundredth column I wrote for CBG.
One hundred column and twice that many pounds under my belt. A couple of life-time achievements.
******
"The Law is a Ass">
Installment # 110
by
Bob Ingersoll
This is the one hundredth installment of "The Law Is a Ass". I just thought you'd like to know.
No gala plans, though. I won't call this a "Special 100th Anniversary," and do a column where everyone I've ever written about teams up to defeat me. (First of all, that's silly. Second, I know what the word "anniversary" means, even if Marvel and DC don't and insist that the 100th issue of a standard monthly comic should be anything more than the 8.33333333333333333333th anniversary.) No, instead of having everyone I've ever taken on team up to outnumber me, I'm going to take on--one-on-one, so I'll outnumber him--someone I've written about many times. Perhaps my most persistent subject and someone who's been with me almost since the beginning--Installment # 3 to be exact. Someone who's now worse than ever.
Who else? The Vigilante.
Once upon a time there was no Vigilante, just a crusading District Attorney named Adrian Chase, who tried to put the bad guys in jail. Chase became enraged, when "textbook" arrests and perfect cases blew up in his face and the bad guys got off on technicalities. The fact that Chase believed you could execute a search warrant by breaking into a house guns a blazing, commando style in the middle of the night, shows he didn't study the same law school textbooks that everyone else uses. My textbooks say search warrants are supposed to be executed during the day and only after the police first knock and announce their intentions. Okay, there are rare exceptions which allow for nighttime searches or no-knock entries, but, as I said, those are the exceptions and not the rule. But Adrian strove to make the exception into the rule. Adrian's perceptions of the legal system always were a little off center. Like Jack the Ripper was a little mixed-up.
One day, Adrian's wife and children were killed by a mobster who had escaped on a technicality. Adrian went a little funny in the head, and he went and did kind of a silly thing. He joined the Ghosts of Victims Past, and learned how to heal faster, fight better, and think even worse than before. He used all this training to become the Vigilante, a costumed hero, who sought out the criminals who got off on technicalities, so that he could kill them.
I was not pleased.
I was then, and am still, sick of the widespread fiction that criminals get off on technicalities faster and in greater numbers than Hollywood pumps out sequels to movies that didn't deserve to have been made in the first place. Those "technicalities" are the Bill of Rights in our Constitution, the inviolable rules which protect all of us from oppressive governmental intrusions and guarantee that we remain the freest country on Earth. Moreover, criminals don't get off on technicalities in great numbers. The national rate of affirmance by the courts of appeals in criminal cases is in the ninetieth percentile. That means that in less than ten out of every one hundred cases do courts of appeal throw out a conviction for a violation of a constitutional right. Even if we throw in those times that a trial court throws out a conviction or evidence, the percentage doesn't grow significantly larger. See, judges have to get re-elected. They don't get re-elected, if they keep on letting stone criminals get off on technicalities, because their constituents won't like them very much. So judges don't let stone criminals get off on technicalities, unless the constitutional violation is so egregious that it simply can't be ignored. Given these simple facts, it seems difficult to understand why there was such a widespread belief in wholesale technicality mongering.
The answer is the media. When a conviction is affirmed, who cares? No one. The media responds accordingly. The story's buried somewhere between "Ask Shagg" and the stock quotations. On the other hand, when a conviction is reversed--especially if it's a high publicity case--the news fills the front page in "Second Coming of Christ" type.
But I digress.
Anyway, Adrian stumbled through several stories built around his efforts to track down scum who got off on technicalities, so he could kill them. It took him a few issues, but Adrian finally came to understand that what he was doing was wrong. He was not the system, he was operating outside of the system. He was not judge, he was not jury. He wasn't even executioner. He wasn't operating under the law and he had no right to kill anyone. Especially not anyone who the system had acquitted for any reason.
Yes it is wrong. I'm not getting into that debate again. If you don't believe me that it's wrong; you're wrong too.
(Of course I can be a priori, it's my column. If you want to disagree, go get your own column!)
Vigilante continued as a costumed hero, until he became disenchanted with the entire concept of costumed vigilantism and abandoned the costume for a judge's robe. He decided that he would rather work within the system that outside it.
To this point The Vigilante chronicled one man's slow process toward regaining his sanity, not to mention the triumph of the system. All told it wasn't bad. Had it ended there, it might even have been noble. Unfortunately, it didn't end there.
Someone else put on the Vigilante costume; someone who was even loopier than Adrian Chase had been.
Judge Alan Wells put on the Vigilante costume. Only he didn't just kill the criminals who escaped on technicalities. He went around killing people indiscriminately. Criminals, street punks, lawyers who got people off on technicalities (And the first person who says anything about a public service is gonna get such a shot!), the girl friends of these assorted targets, even cops who were also killing people who got off on technicalities. Apparently, Alan, couldn't stand the competition.
Wait a second. Adrian. Alan. It must be that Type "A" personality.
Wells's actions attracted the attention of two persons; Adrian, who didn't want anyone else to sully the name of Vigilante (roughly the equivalent of sullying the name of Muammar Qaddafi), and Lt. Harry Stein, a cop who decided Vigilante should probably be arrested, seeing as he was breaking the law by killing people. Adrian tracked down Wells and confronted him. Not surprisingly, Alan didn't take kindly to Adrian's suggestion that he stop and attacked Adrian. Ultimately, Adrian killed Alan in self-defense.
But that didn't end the story of Vigilante, either. Adrian's bailiff, Dave Winston, had learned that Adrian used to be the Vigilante. He decided someone had to do the job, so he put on the costume became the Vigilante. (Secretly, he hoped that Adrian would put the costume on again some day.)
As a masked Vigilante Dave was better than Alan; he didn't kill indiscriminately. But he was boring. So eventually, Dave--who never studied the old proverb be careful what you wish for, you might get it--got iced, and Adrian put the costume back on to avenge Dave's death. Then Adrian was unmasked, so he had to stay as the Vigilante forever, because there was no Adrian Chase anymore. But he's got a new partner, Harry Stein--yes, the same Harry Stein--and a reinstatement of old insanity.
Only it's worse. Now Adrian is even more vile than he, or Alan Wells, had ever been. He kills street punks, child pornographers, body guards, and crime bosses. He doesn't even wait for them to get off on technicalities anymore. He goes after them, before they come to trial--even before they are charged--and kills them. He doesn't mind the fact that none of them has even committed a crime for which the death penalty is a permissible option. He just kills, and delights in it.
Adrian doesn't want to confine himself to criminals either. He wanted to kill child poronography customers, but Stein talked him out of that. For now, anyway. I'll bet when Stein's not looking, Adrian's going to sneak out to the neighborhood 7-11 and blow away anyone who buys a Playboy.
He also kills cops. In Vigilante # 36 Adrian was too lazy to sew his own costume, so he broke into Dave Winston's apartment to steal one of Dave's spares., In the process, Adrian kicked a cop off of a fifth story fire escape, to almost certain death. In the past, Adrian had always been scrupulous in not fighting back against cops, because he didn't want to hurt them. But that was when he was the namby pamby Vigilante. Now he's willing to kill cops, because he's got a new sense of commitment. (I'd like to help Adrian find a commitment myself. Preferably Arkham.) In Vigilante # 41 he blew up an occupied police car, to escape police pursuit.
Adrian's actions are reprehensible! They are anti-social and anarchic. They are to be loathed not emulated. Yet, Adrian is the hero of the book. What's the message there?
I can't forgive the book its message under the theory that, because Adrian has gone off the deep end again, so his acts are the acts of a madman and should not be condoned. Lt. Stein, who is sane and who wanted to arrest Alan Wells for doing the same things Adrian is doing, not only looks the other way while Adrian indulges in criminal excess; Stein helps. The message of this moral ambiguity is: Adrian's acts are not to be scorned, they are to be applauded. Even assisted.
No society can survive if people put themselves above the law. Most costumed heroes do not act in this manner. They see a crime being committed, and they stop the criminal, much as you or I can make a citizen's arrest. That is proper and should be encouraged.
It is, however, very different from the actions of Vigilante, who says, "I know better than the law and will act illegally in order to impose my view of good on the world." This is the philosophy of the lynch mob. It is not a view that should be applauded or imitated. And yet, as I said, Adrian Chase, the Vigilante, is the hero of the book. I don't know what that tells you. It tells me something very fundamental.
Vigilante isn't only a sick character, Vigilante is a sick book!
Bob Ingersoll
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