The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it - Henry David Thoreau

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

My favorite SCOTUS justice has been, for years, Scalia.  Unfortunately, he said this.

The conservative jurist stuck up for Agent Bauer, arguing that fictional or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent’s rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.

“Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. “Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?’ Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.

“So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes.”

There’s more.

Generally, the jurists in the room agreed that coerced confessions carry little weight, given that they might be false and almost never accepted into evidence. But the U.S. Supreme Court judge stressed that he was not speaking about putting together pristine prosecutions, but rather, about allowing agents the freedom to thwart immediate attacks.

“I don’t care about holding people. I really don’t,” Judge Scalia said.

Even if a real terrorist who suffered mistreatment is released because of complaints of abuse, Judge Scalia said, the interruption to the terrorist’s plot would have ensured “in Los Angeles everyone is safe.” During a break from the panel, Judge Scalia specifically mentioned the segment in Season 2 when Jack Bauer finally figures out how to break the die-hard terrorist intent on nuking L.A. The real genius, the judge said, is that this is primarily done with mental leverage. “There’s a great scene where he told a guy that he was going to have his family killed,” Judge Scalia said. “They had it on closed circuit television - and it was all staged. ... They really didn’t kill the family.”

I made this same point with Jonah Goldberg.

As I have said many times on this blog, in a ticking time bomb scenario virtually any level of medieval barbarity could theoretically be justified.  There is, however, one vitally important point to be made here.  When, in modern human history, has this ever happened?  The very fact that Goldberg has to cite a fictional character in order to prove this point shows just how insanely low the chances are of it ever happening.  I grew up watching James Bond and Dirty Harry and I’m a big fan of 24.  Note to Jonah:  these are the product of the mind of a Hollywood screenwriter, not germane examples of real-world occurrences which can be used to justify geopolitical ends.

And now we have Scalia, a man who will be responsible for making vitally important decisions on these subjects, citing a fictional character and fictional scenarios to formulate real-world policy. 

Allow me, though, to answer Scalia.  Do we arrest Jack Bauer?  Absolutely.  And once he explains himself, and demonstrates how he undertook these activities because there was a nuclear weapon about to detonate, we decline to prosecute him.  Killing someone is illegal.  Killing someone in self defense is legal.  Once the killing has taken place the burden falls on the killer to justify his actions.  But you don’t just make killing people legal because sometimes you might have to kill in self defense.

Ugh.  This is just nauseating.