Forgot about that.  Granted, it was fiction, but if I remember right the amputee testified that he didn’t think there was anything wrong with what the avenging father had done. 

I have a hard time get­ting all worked up over an iso­lated instance or two where some­one takes the law into their own hands to account for some­thing that slipped through the cracks, and they get the right guy and do so with­out “col­lat­eral damage.”

The problem is having a party with a conflict of interest deciding what is acceptable justice. Do you have a hard time getting worked up over isolated instances where someone takes the law into their own hands and either gets the wrong guy, or metes a punishment out of proportion to the crime? Shouldn’t we be discouraging people from doing this?

“How many inno­cent vic­tims were there in that movie?”
None that I remem­ber.

They were in there. Quite a few, in fact. One bystander became an amputee, for example.

We could all use more “happy end­ings.” Yes, I went there…

Yes, you did.

dc,
Sorry to have been so long in responding. From #16:“We’d have more shoot­ings, more deaths, more vio­lence, less desir­able out­comes.”  

This is from Dr. Johnathon Tures of Lagrange College, who I don’t know from Adam’s housecat.
http://news.yahoo.com/stand-ground-laws-reduce-crime-182200361.html 

And from Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-your-ground_law#Effect_on_crime_rates 
The study cited has been refereed.

Seems to disagree with your assumption. Yes, in SYG states the “justifiable” homicide rate seems to have gone up in some, but the keyword is “justifiable” and denote a legal finding of fact and NOT a case of vigilante justice.

People’s per­sonal risk analy­ses aren’t always ratio­nal

Or at least may not appear to be. But I’m not trying to talk about the “always” scenarios. I’m talking about the “sometimes” scenarios. No solution in the real world works “always”.

This may well be the same debate as that over voter fraud  and ID laws.

What is the number of annual cases of vigilante justice, per capita, for the most recent year of data available? How does this compare to 50 years ago? To 100 years ago? To 150 years ago? What are the current trends over 5 years, 10 years 25 years?

Without, at the LEAST, such comps, anecdotes are meaningless. Because with the current availability and instant dissemination of information, what may appear to be a growing problem may only be a fraction of historical occurrences. 

I lament “innocent victims” of all stripes.  And while there is something troubling about the idea of “vigilante justice” being a pervasive way of how we mete out retribution/punishment for crimes (and there’s nothing to suggest it is pervasive), I have a hard time getting all worked up over an isolated instance or two where someone takes the law into their own hands to account for something that slipped through the cracks, and they get the right guy and do so without “collateral damage.” 

“How many inno­cent vic­tims were there in that movie?”
 
None that I remember. But there aren’t always innocent victims in real life either. 

“And that was fic­tion, roman­ti­ciz­ing it.”
 
Oh, no doubt. 

“The real world tends to have fewer happy endings.”

We could all use more “happy endings.”  Yes, I went there.…even in a discussion of vigilante justice. 

Yes, I realize that, and I had trouble arriving at precisely the right word I was looking for, but I think I understood what you meant.

People’s personal risk analyses aren’t always rational, and those of potential criminals aren’t usually rational, and sometimes they are just lame excuses. Then there’s that pesky free press that loves to make money overplaying stories like this one.   A jury shouldn’t worry about how the press is going to twist their rationale for its own profit.

Trying to stick with the definitions we’ve been using around,  I can nod and wink that this case wasn’t about vigilante justice at all.  It was an “I snapped” assault combined with a “heat of the moment” component that jumped decades to equal the original heat of the moment after the priest leered just like before, and the jury apparently bought all that.  

I think it would take a pat­tern of jury nul­li­fi­ca­tions to change the aver­age per­cep­tion of the odds of doing time.

It doesn’t take a pattern, but a pattern would naturally have a more substantial effect than would a single case. At the same time, the first high-profile case influences future juries, who are now primed to accept jury nullification as an acceptable (even celebrated) behavior.

I would guess that just one high-​​profile con­vic­tion would be an equal and oppo­site dis­cour­age­ment

It would depend on how much play the conviction got.

There will always be venge­ful assault, but there are bet­ter excuses for it than one jury’s unin­tended enourage­ment.

I’m not talking about excuses here. I’m talking about this input into people’s personal risk analyses. Different people have differing tolerances for risk. Each reduction in expected risk brings in a new group of people whose risk tolerance was a little lower than the prior group.

I think jus­tice takes many forms, and it’s not always admin­is­tered in a court of law.

Extralegal justice creates more innocent victims. Doesn’t this trouble you?

One of my favorite movies of all-​​time is A Time to Kill.

How many innocent victims were there in that movie? And that was fiction, romanticizing it. The real world tends to have fewer happy endings.

How much of this has been because of holes/​flaws in our jus­tice sys­tem where we’ve thrown com­mon sense out the win­dow and let hard­ened crim­i­nals who are very destruc­tive to soci­ety run around scot-​​free.

More than it should be, I suspect…but not for the reason you suggest. I think we find ourselves in a situation where we hear the stories of cases getting thrown out and make a couple of false assumptions: first, that the accused gets away scot-free (in fact, many of them go back for a new trial, which is very different from getting the conviction overturned); second, that this is a very common occurrence (it’s mighty rare, which is what makes it newsworthy when it happens).

Does our system always get it right? Nope. We could change the system to cast a wider net, but that’s going to end up putting more innocent people behind bars. It’s not worth the tradeoff to me.