Legal Rage

 Of all Pam Bondi's grotesque orders at the start of her reign as our new Attorney General, none knocked the wind out of me quite so much as her suggestion that the Justice Department would now try to lean on state prosecutors in order to secure new death penalties for the people whose federal capital sentences Biden had just commuted. 

Apparently, serving out the reminder of their lives in federal prison is not enough to satisfy the malice and vindictiveness of our new AG. The government must also pursue them to the ends of the earth, layering on a second prosecution and further capital sentence for crimes for which they've already been convicted and sentenced. 

Worse still, our Supreme Court has blessed such a scheme, ruling that two prosecutions—state and federal—for the same offense do not in fact violate the Constitution's prohibition on Double Jeopardy (no matter how much it might appear to violate that principle, to the likes of you and me). 

Usually, this is not a problem anyway. The standard safeguard, as the Supreme Court no doubt had in mind at the time, is that most prosecutors from two different levels of sovereignty will not bother to chase down the same defendants. Dual state and federal prosecutions are rare—if for no other reason than because they are an obvious waste of resources. 

But our Justices, in ruling as they did, were perhaps underestimating the power of vindictiveness and stupidity in politics. They were giving elected officials too much credit. It turns out that some officials really will have the "legal rage," to borrow a phrase from the poet Robert Burns, to pursue people to the ends of the earth. 

Burns used that phrase—"legal rage"—to describe the immense, bottomless vindictiveness of the state toward the convicted criminal in his dungeon. It came to mind for me as most apt, in trying to characterize the level of mindless cruelty required to undertake a new capital case against people who had only just been snatched, a few weeks ago, from the jaws of death. 

Apparently, these prisoners cannot be allowed to live out their lives in prison in relative peace. They cannot be allowed to breathe a sigh of relief that at least they will not be sent to the death chamber. Bondi must take even that fleeting respite from them. 

Into the noose, they must go, says Bondi—those whose "necks," like all human necks, were surely meant for better things "Than strangling in a string" (to quote Housman). 

Where is rage? Where is murder? It is not in the hearts of these prisoners. The blood is on the hands of their would-be executioners. 

The guilt weighs far heavier on the side of those who are so in thrall to a demagogic agenda—so willing to mortgage their own integrity to serve a would-be strongman and score cheap political points—that they would send men and women to death twice over, who only a few weeks before had been rescued like brands from the kindling. 

Of Bondi and Trump, whose bidding she serves, surely Edgar Lee Masters's proposed headstone for a hanging judge is apt: 

Even Hod Putt, the murderer,

Hanged by my sentence,

Was innocent in soul compared with me.