Dirty Harry: Inadmissible

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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30 Responses

  1. greginak says:

    Well in the 70’s and 80’s technicality meant any thing led to the bad guy getting out. Constitution, rights etc= technicality. It’s actually pretty much right there in Dirty Harry. When Harold is told by his boss that the murderer, played by the great Andrew Robinson, had rights H is furious because the psychokiller ( Qu’est-ce que c’est?) had rights. He mocked his rights , which was a really frickin common thing back then. DH snarled “what about the rights of that little girl” in response to the claim the bad guy had rights.

    I’ll add something i’ve said before. Dirty Harry is a great movie. It’s also ridiculously over the top and the plot/writing is a clown show of forcing it’s viewpoint on the viewer. That so many people bought into as even a remotely real view of the world does explain a lot the conservative view of crime.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to greginak says:

      The Cosby victim I was listening to on NPR was mocking Cosby’s rights and lamenting her own just like ol’ Harry.Report

    • Douglas Hayden in reply to greginak says:

      Dirty Harry was very much a product of its time, just after the chaos of the late ’60s as the great White Flight to the suburbs was in full swing. My dad remembers watching it at the theater and the audience was cheering Harry on at the end to put a bullet into Scorpio.

      I imagine it was those reactions that led to the sequels where we learned that Vigilante Cops Are Actually Bad, Women Cops Are Actually Good, Vigilantism Is Really Complicated, and R/C Cars And Harpoons Can Be Dangerous.Report

  2. I have always hated the phrase “got off on a technicality”. Almost all of the time, “technicality” means a serious violation of someone’s rights.Report

    • Brandon Berg in reply to Michael Siegel says:

      Yes, but it also often means that a known person who’s been proven guilty goes free, and this can also lead to serious rights violations.

      It’s very important to protect Constitutional rights (except 9th, 10th, and some 2nd Amendment rights, and 1st Amendment rights for people we don’t like), but the exclusionary rule is not the only, or necessarily best, way to deter rights violations.

      In principle, my preference would be to personally penalize the individuals responsible for deliberate rights violations. Why punish zero rights violations when we can punish two?

      In practice, it turns out that that’s really hard, so I don’t know. I guess we’re stuck with the exclusionary rule until we can solve that problem.Report

      • InMD in reply to Brandon Berg says:

        There is no alternative to the exclusionary rule if rights are to mean anything. There’s also an inherent conflict of interest in the state holding itself accountable. Frankly it sucks at it.

        Anyway all this hand wringing about bad guys going free is mostly hypothetical movie stuff. Even in situations where some evidence is inadmissible it’s extraordinarily rare for all evidence to be inadmissible. In practice the rule acts more as a factor in negotiations with the prosecutor, not eliminating ‘smoking gun’ evidence from trials, of which there are relatively few to begin with.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Brandon Berg says:

        In order to hit the police for the rights violation, judges would have to be willing to do it. Judges are notoriously unwilling to punish cops, even when they are openly breaking the law (as the various QI cases show us).

        If we followed your ideal, what would happen in our current system is that rights would almost never be found to be violated so as to avoid having to punish the cop, or the punishment for the cop would be a stern letter in their file, never to be seen by the public so as to avoid damaging their career.Report

      • Reformed Republica in reply to Brandon Berg says:

        A good solution would be for the cops to do their job properly and not violate people’s rights, then they would not have to worry about evidence being excluded.Report

      • Brandon Berg in reply to Brandon Berg says:

        Just an FYI to everyone who responded to this comment: It has four paragraphs.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Michael Siegel says:

      Well, I’m all broken up about that man’s rights.Report

  3. LeeEsq says:

    Like my brother pointed out everywhere, lots of people believe in “it’s better than ten guilty men go free rather than one innocent men be punished” in theory but not in practice. This is because many of the times many people who get acquitted because their rights have been violated are probably factually guilty of the crimes they committed. This gets to a lot of people emotionally, especially if the crime in question is something they really care about and see as a great evil.

    A related issue is that lots people are capable imagining themselves as needing the First Amendment or being some sort of person that people are trying to censor. Fewer people are going to see themselves as needing the 4th to 8th Amendments because most people don’t like to imagine themselves as being on the receiving end of law justly or unjustly.Report

    • Brandon Berg in reply to LeeEsq says:

      Being on the receiving end of First Amendment violations doesn’t necessarily mean being personally censored. It could also mean having media or information you want to access censored, or having others’ expressions of ideas you agree with censored.

      In general, I think people actually are really good at predicting whether they’ll ever be charged with crimes. It’s not a question of what people like to imagine; it’s really is pretty rare for law-abiding people to be arrested and charged with crimes mistakenly. People with rap sheets are far more likely to draw suspicion. That doesn’t mean it’s not very important, of course, just that people aren’t wrong, factually, to assume that they’re unlikely to personally need 4th or 8th Amendment protections.

      Also, First Amendment absolutism isn’t as popular as it used to be, if it ever was. Pew found that 28% of Americans and 40% of Millennials support banning statements that are offensive to minorities:

      https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-millennials-ok-with-limiting-speech-offensive-to-minorities

      That’s just for that one particular ox being gored. There are a bunch of conservatives who would be happy to censor things they don’t like, and don’t forget the histrionics over Citizens United.

      I think people are far more likely to underestimate the chances of needing First Amendment protections than they are to underestimate the chances of needing Fourth or Eighth Amendment protections.Report

  4. LeeEsq says:

    Re Crosby: The critics of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision believe that the deal made by the original Prosecutor wasn’t concrete enough to be a a real deal because it wasn’t in writing and shouldn’t bind subsequent Prosecutors as a result. The people who kind of see the Court’s logic believe that there was enough reasonable reliance from Crosby and his lawyers to create a promissory estoppel. The critics do not believe Crosby faced an enormous violation of his rights because nobody should have relied on something so vacuous.Report

  5. DensityDuck says:

    This was cribbed from Adam Elkus’s account on Twitter (@aelkus) compiled and some editing by me. He deletes all his tweets every five minutes so he probably doesn’t even remember posting this. As far as I know he hasn’t written any essays about it.

    *****

    The centurion is an archetype of someone who is a part of an institution which provides some sort of public good, but who feels perpetually underappreciated by society and betrayed by their own superiors. This feeling is, of course, subjective; it may or may not be justified. But it’s common among people such as police, soldiers, doctors/medical technicians, humanitarian aid workers, journalists, teachers, etc. Their tasks often expose them to the worst society has to offer, they operate in conditions of high stress, their accomplishments are celebrated in abstract but often unknown in specific (though their failures are dragged out for everyone to see), and they have symbolic status in the world yet live personally precarious lives and often lack actual agency in their job.

    One response is to retreat into self-pity, loathing of outsiders, and finally the willingness to break core professional norms because of the feeling that if you are asked to do a vital job people should not tell you how to do it — the now-infamous “you need me on that wall” speech from “A Few Good Men”. Colonel Jessup’s rant has become something of a cliché but you can see echoes of it in the defensive reactions of almost any public-service worker that finds themselves in a similar position of being challenged for dubious or even illegal behavior.

    Harry Callahan’s choice in “Magnum Force” is much different. He is willing to engage in Jessup-like actions in the pursuit of his mission, and he views with disdain both the civilians he protects and his superiors in the SFPD and the SF city government. Callahan does not believe that society can be salvaged, and he was (and is) certainly not alone in that sentiment. It was a common one in 1970s America when the film was made. Yet he also has the courage to directly oppose a far-right death squad of motorcycle cops. The death squad are authorized, as it turns out, by the head of the SFPD himself. And at one point they ask Harry why he still stands up for an order that he himself does not believe in, why he defends a system that he doesn’t think works.

    Harry’s response is short and very simple. He is a man of few words, and he merely says that until someone has a better idea he will defend the current system to his dying breath. This is, for a mostly-forgotten 1970s genre-cop movie, almost Thomas More-like. It’s the spectacle of someone being bound by duty even when he thinks no one else is, and in service of something he blatantly despises, but who feels nonetheless that duty itself is worth serving and that service is what makes society more than a collection of mutual interests. It’s the other, more positive side of the centurion pattern. I honestly think both are real. The problem is that a critical mass of the first type can eventually overwhelm the second, and the second can easily flip into the first if disillusioned or disgusted. For me, encouraging or accommodating centurions is dangerous precisely because they can tap into powerful collective feelings of uneasiness about the state of the world and whether or not government can provide order. This isolates them further from society and often gets them to the point where, like the Rampart cops, they start to see corruption as a privilege instead of a failure, and outsiders’ concern as second-guessing rather than genuine alarm.

    You might ask “aren’t many superhero or revenge-fantasy backstories premised in a similar ‘they suffered b/c of institutional complacency and re-emerge as vigilantes willing to do the duty others shirk’ idea? The Punisher, Batman, the Shadow, Daredevil…” Well, that is the remarkable thing. Callahan in the first Dirty Harry movie (and the other three) is a vigilante with a badge. But in the second movie he becomes the ultimate inside enforcer. The radical idea is that he might do his job even when his targets are nominal allies. This isn’t common in superhero comics, where even the vigilantes usually end up as part of the heroes’ team, punching the bad guys for justice.

    Of course, Magnum Force is still a Hollywood movie. At the end Callahan does take it on himself to kill the Obviously Bad People; he doesn’t turn the chief over to the system, he sneaks a bomb into the guy’s car and blows him up. That ending scene is ambiguous and may be the biggest flaw of the movie, but an ending where the big bad guy gets to walk away would have been hard to sell to cop-movie audiences in 1973. A far better variation on it is “Elite Squad 2” (“Tropa De Elite 2” is its original Brazilian title) where Captain Nascimento ends up blowing the whistle. It doesn’t do much good, but he does his duty, and that’s perhaps the truest expression of the centurion story. Another alternative is Stoneface Vimes in Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” stories, a rebel who killed an evil king and then allowed himself to be executed because he’d committed murder.

    This was quite opposite “Dirty Harry” screenwriter John Milius’s viewpoint for how the centurion story ought to go. An interesting contrast is Milius’s “Apocalypse Now”; his original spec script ends with Willard siding with Colonel Kurtz and the two of them dying in a suicidal last stand against the US air cavalry. “Magnum Force”, on the other hand, was a collaboration with Eastwood and Michael Cimino; the latter had just written “Silent Running”, where the guardian of Earth’s last plant life flies away into space to protect it, choosing his nominal mission over the whims of his superiors in the service of a society that has mostly forgotten about him. To me, the first seems like an abdication of a creator’s responsibility to think through the implications of his work, because unless people are speaking to you personally there’s no way to isolate readers from extreme interpretations of what the character is really about. And by ‘think through’, I mean to understand that he — and it’s telling that with a few prominent exceptions the centurion is a he — represents psychological and behavioral responses to a protector’s perception that the established system cannot work. That’s not an uncommon feeling even in the best of times and it’s not really something associated with following rules or obeying social norms.

    These second thoughts often appear after the initial creation. Clint Eastwood — who had become a very controversial figure because of the perceived politics of the first DH movie — read newspaper clippings about Latin American death squads (e.g. Pinochet) and decided to incorporate his reaction into a Californian police drama. His reasoning was what Harry espouses in the movie, that removing the thin fig leaf of legal justification behind killing would create a kind of anarchy within a dictatorship, where no one would be safe because people with legal authority to kill could murder based on idiosyncratic whims. The system might be rotten and run by rotten people, but it was worth protecting because it *was* a system, because the alternative was giving in to chaos and the whim of the powerful. (In a similar vein, the guy who wrote the “Death Wish” book went on to write a sequel called “Death Sentence” in which the hero hunts down a vigilante.)

    The remaining Dirty Harry movies (along with “The Rookie”, Eastwood’s return to the genre in the early 1990s) are much more on the Jessup side of the decision. And Eastwood’s final (so far) outing for the idea, “Gran Torino”, mostly explores the hope that society might give the centurion the reward he’s looking for, recognition and remembrance, albeit after he dies protecting it. We occasionally see glimpses of the noble centurion, but we far more often see the bastard, in real life as well as in fiction, perhaps because Achilles is so much more directly inspiring than Sisyphus. What did audiences think? Based on relative box office receipts, they found Magnum Force about as likeable as the first movie; the third and fourth performed much better, the fourth one especially so, and it seems that a return to the typical formula was what moviegoers were looking for. The fifth movie dropped off significantly, though, so maybe familiarity breeds contempt, particularly when your competition is Axel Foley.Report

    • Chip Daniels in reply to DensityDuck says:

      FWIW, Joseph Wambaugh, a retired LAPD officer wrote a series of influential novels about policing in the early 70s, the first one called The New Centurions, another called the Blue Knight which was made into a movie starring George Kennedy.

      The novels portrayed the police as Elkus describes, the beleaguered and unappreciated supporter of the system which despised them.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Chip Daniels says:

        The thing I find interesting is how little ‘despising’ it takes to turn the centurion. There are some real blue snowflakes out there.Report

        • Chip Daniels in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          I remember reading The New Centurion and sympathizing with the poor officers who endured the contempt and abuse of the citizens.

          It didn’t occur to my adolescent self to see the contempt the officers held for the citizens they were charged with protecting.

          Partly because this contempt was so deeply embedded in the popular culture of the time- the citizens portrayed were invariably some alien Other; urban residents, hippies, elite pointy headed college professors.

          Thee was some show I recall, maybe one of the CSI or Law and Order type, where in one episode the cops are outside some slum apartment of some suspected bad guy, and kick in the door without a warrant, and smirk about it. Then later they go to interview a suspected bad guy at his mansion, and he comes out and coldly stares them down and tells them to GTFO unless they have a warrant, and the cops meekly cringe and turn around.

          It was amazing to me how the writers, producers, directors and audience all just considered this the Way Things Work.

          The dichotomy of treatment wasn’t noted or commented on, it wasn’t highlighted as some injustice, it was just presented as the normal workings of things, utterly normal.

          And this is so deeply ingrained in society, where all of us just carry around this subconscious understanding that there are in fact two sets of laws, one for the Decent People, and another for the rabble.Report

          • Oscar Gordon in reply to Chip Daniels says:

            Sleeping under bridges and all that.

            The dichotomy of the treatment has always troubled me. The powerful elite are permitted to treat the police with disdain when confronted by them, but the less privileged are obligated to treat the police with careful respect. It’s a kind of transference, that the price we pay for allowing the elite to be that way is that the rest of us are supposed to not.Report

            • JS in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

              That’s a rosy view.

              Bluntly, the privilaged (white middle class and up) can treat the police with disdain and get no more than a mild slap on the wrist — a gentle arrest, at worse. (Unless said middle class+ whites are obviously liberal or hippies. That’ll get you pepper sprayed, batoned, or otherwise beaten down for not knowing your place. See: Any liberal-based protest.)

              Anyone else is forced to treat the police like they’re skittish animals, liable to lash out for any and no reason at everyone around them.Report

  6. Chip Daniels says:

    Whenever the argument is made that respecting rights AKA “getting off on a technicality” is in opposition to effective policing, it needs to be pointed out that regimes that don’t respect rights are almost all universally inept at effectively suppressing crime. They can ferret out a dissident but can’t catch a pickpocket.

    Respecting rights isn’t opposed to effective policing- it is a prerequisite for it.Report

    • LeeEsq in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      Like my brother points out, many people do not like it when a factually guilty person goes free because of.a flaw in the process. Many will stomp up and down and say there was no flaw rather than admit somebody’s rights were violated. When the crime was something as flagrant as Cosby’s crimes than this seems especially infuriating.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to LeeEsq says:

        Going back and looking over the process and making sure it was followed is something that only seems to happen among a particular economic class.

        It’s one of those things where if a right is not enjoyed by everybody, it’s merely privilege extended.Report

        • CJColucci in reply to Jaybird says:

          Tell that to the hosts of legal aid lawyers, trial and appellate, for whom this is their everyday work. Not that being able to afford private counsel whose high rates permit low caseloads doesn’t help a lot, but surprisingly few of the cases where convictions get reversed for procedural errors involve well-heeled defendants.Report