Law & Justice

People take the law for granted, until it fails. We assume that the man who steals our car or breaks into our house will be prosecuted and punished. What happens when that assumption is no longer valid? When the law fails to protect the citizens and punish the lawbreakers?
The small town of Skidmore, Missouri found out on July 10, 1981, when Ken Rex McElroy was shot to death as he sat in his pickup on the main street of town. McElroy had waged a twenty-year reign of terror over all of northwest Missouri, getting away with almost every crime in the book: rape, arson, kidnapping, burglary, theft, assault, you name it. The law seemed powerless to stop him; witnesses changed their stories; judges recused themselves from his cases; prosecutors dismissed indictments; the town marshal resigned.

I told the story of McElroy’s reign of terror, his shooting, and the ensuing silence by the numerous witnesses to the murder in the book In Broad Daylight, which was published by HarperCollins in 1989, and which won an Edgar Award for Best True Crime and was made into a movie starring Brian Denehey. I revisited the story in a twenty-five year anniversary edition of the book published by St. Martins Press in December 2006. This edition contains startling new information on the killing and the identity of the killers.

It is not surprising that after all this time the witnesses to the killing still have not talked about what they saw that hot July morning. You might hear them say something like “McElroy needed killing,” and what they mean is that the town believed it had no choice but to take the law into its own hands. In their view, the town had returned to the lawlessness of the frontier days, when individuals undertook their own protection at the end of a barrel. Indeed, McElroy was stalking, with a weapon, several witnesses who were scheduled to testify against him in a bond revocation hearing the next week.

You can argue whether what happened that day was morally right or wrong. On Larry King Live, King opined that taking a life outside the law was never the right thing to do. Others argue that it should have happened long before it did.

Behind the discussion is a very basic principle of civilized society, a contract between the government and its citizens: you give up the right to enforce the law and punish lawbreakers in exchange for the government’s promise to do it for you. Put your weapons away and the government—in the form of the criminal justice system—will protect you.

In general, when one party fails to a contract fails to live up to his obligations the other party is released from his promise. If the government cannot protect me, I am entitled to protect myself. If the law t cannot protect the town, the town is entitled to protect itself, to “take the law into its own hands,” as the saying goes. It’s a scary notion in many ways, and it certainly sets a dangerous precedent, in effect allowing individual citizens to decide when they are entitled to engage in “self help.”

My friend Clare has always been interested in law and justice, but growing up in a poor area of the country where opportunities were limited, she dropped out of the education system at a young age and started a reasonable yet largely unrewarding job. For years she dreamt of going to college to study for a criminal justice degree but time, family commitments and money prevented her from realising her ambitions. But only last year Clare enrolled on an online criminal justice degree and hasn’t looked back since.

I’m surprised at the pace of her learning. I’d never considered a distance learning degree could be that practical, but thanks to the popularity of using the web as a quite useful teaching tool it seems a range of studies can be delivered through online education.

Although Clare is – or rather was – completely new to studying or working in the criminal justice sector, many other students already have a career in the criminal justice profession; they are either building on their existing skills and knowledge to develop their role, or looking to progress into a new job, or even both.

What Clare is discovering and what is generally considered to be one of the greatest benefits of online study, is that it is as vocational as you need it to be, especially considering that teachers will usually have recent experience of, or still be working in, the criminal justice sector.

Clare’ experience of course is limited, but even after 3 months she’s finding the criminal justice degree that she’s studying for online to be well worth the effort of fitting in a degree course around her work and family commitments.

Because online colleges that offer criminal justice BA degrees online understand that their students will come from a variety of backgrounds, courses are especially geared to consider a wide range of often quite specific needs.

Clare’s attitude with technology is fairly pragmatic. If she doesn’t find it useful then she won’t use it. According to her, a simple understanding of the web is enough to take advantage of the incredibly easy to use online systems for studying her criminal justice degree online.

Address: 1 First Street Northeast, Washington DC

Architect: Cass Gilbert (he is best known for designing the Woolworth building in New York)

Height: 92 feet, or five floors

Construction began: October 13, 1932

Construction completed: 1935, It took 3 years

Cost to build: $9.74 million

Made of: Marble, mostly from Vermont, Georgia, and Alabama, but the marble for the 24 columns inside the courtroom were ordered special from Italy.

What is inside:

Basement: Maintenance, parking garage, mailroom

Ground floor: Cafeteria, gift shop, clerk’s office

2nd floor: The Great Hall, the courtroom, conference room, all of the judge’s chambers (except for one)

3rd floor: 1 judges chamber (she picked the one on the 3rd floor because it was bigger), the office of the decision reporter, legal office, law clerks offices, dining room, reading room

4th floor: library

5th floor: gym and basketball court

What is this building used for?

Inside there is only one courtroom, but it is the most powerful court in the whole country. If a case has already gone to trial somewhere else and nobody can seem to figure out what is fair, the case will go to the Supreme Court to solve the problem.

Why is it important?

When the colonists decided they wanted to become a country, the leaders got together and wrote The Constitution to make sure everyone was treated fairly. Each of the 50 states has its own law, but they all have to follow the laws of the country, too. Sometimes a law will be written in such a confusing way nobody can understand exactly what it means. The justices who work in the Supreme Court do not make new laws, they have the job of figuring out what the law says, and if the law is fair. The Supreme Court is there to make sure every person is guaranteed his or her constitutional rights. If a person has had a trial in another court, but the judge couldn’t make a decision, or it doesn’t seem like the decision was fair, the case will finally end up in the Supreme Court so that the judges who work there can make a final decision. All of the other courts in America have to follow what the Supreme Court says. It is important that all Americans, rich or poor, have equality. The Supreme Court makes sure that some people aren’t treated worse just because they are a certain color or don’t have a lot of money. Even The President has to listen to what the Supreme Court rules.