The mystery does not always end when the crime has been solved.
Indeed, the most insolvable problems of crime and punishment are
not so much who committed the crime, but how to see that justice is
done. Now, in this illuminating volume, one of America's great
legal thinkers, Norval Morris, addresses some of the most
perplexing and controversial questions of justice in a highly
singular fashion--by examining them in fictional form, in what he
calls "parables of the law."
The protagonist of these stories, the figure who must see that
justice is done, is Eric Blair, a name familiar to most readers:
it's the real name of George Orwell. In fact, Morris has set his
tales in the time and place of Orwell's famous essay, "Shooting an
Elephant," in Moulmein, Burma, in the 1920s. What might seem a
curious strategy at first glance--borrowing Orwell's persona to
narrate these tales--is actually a brilliant stroke. For in Eric
Blair we have an ideal narrator to highlight the complexities of
justice: an untrained police lieutenant and junior magistrate,
uncertain of judgement--and all the more likely to anguish over
judgement, and to examine every facet of a case before deciding.
And in 1920s Moulmein we have a neutral time and space in which to
consider--free of our own political, religious, or social
prejudices--a set of contemporary legal and moral questions that
rarely find so calm an arena. And these stories certainly address
some highly charged issues--capital punishment, insanity as a
murder defense, the "battered wife syndrome" as a murder defense,
child custody, "parental neglect" due to religious conviction--to
name a few. In each tale, Norval Morris excels at placing Blair at
the centerof a controversy that has no easy answer, and that he and
he alone must decide. In the title story, for instance, a retarded
boy, whose only understanding of sex comes from the brothel in
which he works, accidentally murders a young girl while raping her,
his only defense being "Please sir, I paid her." Blair can see that
the boy doesn't realize that he has committed a crime, but both the
Burmese and the European community of Moulmein demand the boy's
execution. Does capital punishment make sense in such an instance?
Does it ever make sense? To broaden our understanding of these
intricate cases, Morris concludes each story with a perceptive and
often provocative commentary on each issue. After "Brothel Boy,"
for instance, Morris points out that no reputable study has ever
shown capital punishment to be an effective deterrent to future
murders, and more surprisingly, that paroled murderers commit
proportionately fewer homicides than paroled felons who used a
firearm in the commission of their crime.
Norval Morris is one of America's foremost experts on crime and
punishment, and the stories collected here represent the
culmination of a lifetime of thought on the major criminal law
debates of our time. A reader of these tales will come away with a
deeper understanding of these debates and with a profound respect
for the intricacies of justice and the complexity of the law.
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