Victims and Bystanders Sometimes Engage in Retaliatory Justice
A nine-year-old girl is allegedly raped on two occasions by her uncle. Her uncle’s son allegedly molests her older brother. Their mother reports these allegations to the police and a bitter family feud ensues. One day, the mother drives to the uncle’s workplace and directly confronts him. She claims the
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uncle laughs and says, “What are you going to do about it?” She responds by shooting him five times, reloads her revolver, and pumps five more rounds into him. Then she turns herself in, sobbing, “He raped my baby.” In her first trial, the jury acquits her of first-degree murder but is deadlocked over the charge of second-degree murder. In her second trial, the jury acquits her of second-degree murder but finds her guilty of voluntary manslaughter. She is sentenced to four years in prison, but on appeal, her punishment is reduced to just six months behind bars. (Francescani, 2007)
A police officer’s wife approaches a 22-year-old man as he watches a basketball game. Believing that he had groped her 13-year-old daughter two weeks earlier, she pulls out a gun and shoots him in the chest, yelling, “That’s what you get for messing with my children!” The 41-year-old mother is arrested and charged with murder and criminal possession of a weapon. But when the dead man’s pal declines to “snitch” and refuses to testify against her, the prosecution drops all charges against her. (Ginsberg, 2009)
Violent retaliation and vigilantism should not be confused with the legitimate use of force in self- defense. Retaliatory violence embodies the use of force to punish an offender after a crime has been completed. Once the immediate threat has passed, the victim—or the victim’s protectors—may not use violence to exact revenge. Their “do- it-yourself” vengeance has been labeled retaliatory justice. This outlawed alternative to formal case processing within the criminal justice system in com- mon parlance is dubbed back-alley justice, curbstone justice, street justice, or frontier justice. The victim’s forceful response exceeds the limits of what the laws of self-defense permit. When innocent victims gain the upper hand during confrontations, they may overreact, not only to subdue their attackers but also to make them pay on the spot for their attempted crimes.
Bystanders also can get swept up by the conta- gious urge to meet out on-the-spot retaliatory jus- tice and transform in an instant from good Samaritans to “bad Samaritans.” These onlookers who spontaneously intervene to break up a crime in progress, to rescue a person in trouble, and to catch an assailant can get caught up by a mob men- tality or crowd psychology and feel compelled to “get in a few good licks” to punish the offender right then and there, as in these two cases:
A 26-year-old man forces his way into an unlocked apartment where a 22-year-old mother is playing with five children. Brandishing a knife, he sexually assaults her while some of the children flee. Later, as he gets dressed, the victim escapes and runs to her boyfriend. The boyfriend, in front of a gathering crowd, confronts the accused rapist in the apartment building, and a fight ensues. The melee spills over into the parking lot. Someone in the mob beats the alleged rapist with a bat and another man shoots him in the head. “He got what he deserved,” a neighbor says. (AP, 2008c)
A 17-year-old fires a semiautomatic pistol at a group of young men milling about the grounds of a housing project. He fails to hit anyone, and when he runs out of bullets, his intended targets start to chase him. After about seven blocks, a mob of between ten to fifteen young men and a few women catches up with him and starts beating him. They stomp on him for about five minutes until someone finishes him off by smashing him in the head with a large rock. Two of the young men are arrested for murder, but a resident says, “He got street justice. You live by the gun, you die by the gun.” (Schwirtz, 2013)
To government officials, criminologists, and victimologists, street justice is the modern-day expression of an old-fashioned crowd impulse called vigilantism. Clear-cut examples usually attract extensive media coverage and become well known. Most reported incidents fit into one of three categories (see Shotland, 1976): victims avenging an earlier incident (a common reason for drive-by shootings); retaliatory actions carried out
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on behalf of victims by family members or close friends; and spontaneous mob actions in which a crowd gets carried away when responding to a vic- tim’s call for help, beating or killing suspects, which represents vigilantism by bystanders.