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Comment by leetcrew | Hacker News Reader

it seems like a more extreme version of jury nullification. if it became widespread, it would essentially be the end of rule-of-law. but in isolated and rare situations, perhaps it's a beneficial escape valve? easy to suggest from my comfy office in a quiet suburb of course.

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I think this is different. Jury nullification is about a lawbreaker not being punished. Vigilantiism is about an innocent person (innocent until proven guilty through judicial process) being punished. If we as a society have committed to the idea that option a is better than option b, then they seem more like opposites.

I meant more from the refusing to witness side. people deciding as a community not to witness a killing seems like a similar kind of thing to a group of jurors (drawn from the community) deciding to acquit someone they believe is guilty.

in both cases, it's an opportunity for the community to make a decision that falls somewhat outside the letter of the law. jury nullification has been used for both noble and quite ugly ends in the US.

Jury nullification can also be used to rescue innocent people railroaded by self-serving or corrupt prosecution that can manipulate jurors into believing their side of the story.

It's not a 'beneficial escape valve' when the community decides to, say, kill the n_______ who had the audacity to sleep with a white woman.

Which is a far more common application of lynching. We should not be glorifying this.

Regardless of whether or not vigilantism is ever justified, I don't think that killing someone that has made a credible threat which law enforcement has shown they are unable to protect you against is equivalent to killing motivated by racism.

Lynching has always been driven by people reacting to what they believe was a credible threat, that law enforcement has failed to protect them from.

In the historic case, that 'credible threat' was 'race mixing', uppity ______s, jews that were too well off for their own good, etc.

When you let the most violent members of a small town community unilaterally decide what is, and what is not a credible threat, that is exactly what you will get.

Are you comparing a townspeople who faced daily threats of actual violence from a pedophile bully, and who watched him routinely evade justice in the courts, to lynch mobs who executed random people of a certain skin color for looking at someone's daughter the wrong way?

"Credible threat" has an actual meaning beyond just "whatever people think a 'credible threat' is".

It was credible enough to them that they would kill another human being over it.

The whole point of a lynch mob is that you get to throw out any objective standard of credible threat, and replace it with a subjective, heat-of-the-moment one, proposed by the thugs leading it, who know they will face no accountability for their actions.

That's what happens when you normalize lynching. Shitty people will happily use it as a weapon for injustice.

"credible enough to them" is a meaningless phrase which elides the crucial distinction at hand. The people of Skidmore were objectively justified in feeling physically threatened by McElroy. Lynch mobs were not.

If you want to argue a slippery slope exists (and I think that may indeed be the case), blurring these very different motives together does not bolster your case. I mean, the town of Skidmore didn't go on to exact this kind of vigilante justice on anyone else, did it?

Exactly. Hindsight is 20-20 and with hindsight we pretty much agree this guy got what he had coming to him (even if the proper legal procedures weren't followed) whereas the people who got lynched for racial reasons didn't.

I'm not following this logic.

You're claiming that the only reason anyone would kill is if they feel a credible threat to their own life, but this simply isn't true. People kill for all sorts of other reasons. Lynch mobs were primarily driven by these other reasons, not primarily by reasons that boil down to self-defense.

It was credible enough to them that they would kill another human being over it.

Perhaps, but the question was directed to you, not to them.

So in this case would you say that it was not a viable threat but was instead equivalent to being threatened by race mixing?

To be clear: I am not saying that their actions were right, just that its not fair to compare them to something like racially motivated lynching.

The issue here is that morality is subjective. In the end, it is a group of people that decide what is acceptable. Tensions arise when different groups of people come to different conclusion. This occurs when those groups are separated by time, distance, or some form of self identification.

To compound this issue, there does seem to be some parts of morality that are near universal, and can thus almost be established as objective. However, deciding that something is objectively morally right / wrong is generally overturned later on. Certainly, there are many examples of objective moral judgements that have turned out not to be universal.

In conclusion, we should not strive towards a set of rules for deciding whether something is moral. Instead, we should try to get closer to consensus on what is moral without expecting to ever even get close.

The world is not black and white. Sometimes something that's awful and terrible in one context is a necessary evil in another.

I think that "physically terrifying (as in, can dead lift a couple hundred pounds like it's nothing) guy who has been convicted of multiple crimes but the police are too afraid/incompetent/paid-off to actually keep him in jail" easily crosses the bar of "I'm not going to feel bad if vigilante justice takes its course".

No one's denying that terrible things have happened in the name of vigilante justice. But this is not the same thing. Justice spoke, but enforcement refused to do its job.

Glorifying this in general is definitely bad for exactly the reason you said, but I think glorifying this case specifically is fine. This is a specific case in which legal process broke down, not a case in which there weren't laws that covered or should have covered the behavior of the victim. Law gets its privilege from the consent of the governed given based on its integrity, consistency, and gradual convergence to reflect the specifics of that consensus, not by basis of being designated "law."

If the law isn't working, it will be abandoned.

Laws on race were imposed from a larger consensus on race (federally.) There's no such consensus on defending bullies who are terrorizing their neighbors. Specifics matter.

I dunno why you're being down voted but this is true. America is a lot more racist than the Bay.

Are you implying that SF is a lot less racist than America is on average, or that there are places in America that are a lot more racist than SF?

"Beneficial" is probably too gentle a word. Vigilante justice is always bad. In this specific case, it was arguably less bad than the alternative, but that doesn't mean it's a good principle in general.

Rule of law is essentially about process for resolving disputes. In this case, it doesn't seem to be any dispute - it seems that the community had came to a consensus (almost unanimous if we discount McElroy himself and his wife Trena) about what how they wanted things to be.

Rule of law is not only about the practice of resolving disputes, though that's important, it's also about the belief that the process is what is used to handle criminals like McElroy. If that belief is shaken, it's much more damaging than if the system itself is a bit inefficient or corrupt but people still believe in it.

There are two perspectives here. The outer perspective is 'should we condemn the actions taken here as outsiders'.

The other, inner perspective is 'would you have participated in the killing, or at least be okay with refusing to testify against the killer?'

I think it might be okay for the judgement of the situation from the different perspectives to be inconsistent.

I feel that this reverses cause and consequence - in this scenario it's not that this lynching would damage the belief in the legal process, but rather than the lynching happened because of (justified) disbelief in the legal process.

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