Abdulrahman Zeitoun, hero of an eponymous book by Dave Eggers, had been arrested in New Orleans for allegedly attempting to arrange the murder of his ex-wife and two other people.
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| Photograph: Julie Dermansky/Polaris. Taken from The Guardian. |
I'm ashamed to say that I've never read Zeitoun, despite my interest in criminal justice and the fact that I spent a year living in New Orleans. The news still shocked and fascinated me, though. More than anything, it drove home the simple point that people are complicated - a reality that our criminal justice system often ignores. Defendants are almost never permitted to present information that allows the court to consider them in toto (if such a thing is even possible). The major exception is during the mitigation phase of capital cases [1].
After finishing the piece, I recalled an interview I had had with the Committee for Public Counsel Services. It was spring of my senior year; I desperately wanted to be an investigator at a public defender's office, but I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. One of the attorneys interviewing me asked what should have been a softball question: why did I want to defend people? I gave some convoluted answer about fairness, the necessity of a zealous defense, and bloated prison sentences. The attorney interrupted my rambling thought with a question: did I think that good people could do bad things? It was only after I left the interview that I realized how incomplete this justification was.
In his life, Zeitoun has helped save lives and, perhaps, endangered them. What does that make him on the balance? If our actions define us, how do we balance good and bad deeds; how might we compare them? Does Zeitoun consider his own actions consistent?
If anyone wants to really delve into a mind-bending example of this sort of quandary, I'd recommend listening to the Fritz Haber section of Radiolab's The Bad Show.
Thanks for reading.
J
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