Posted for KXYL's Connie Carmichael - Assassins and other killers
For judges, prosecutors and witnesses, bringing criminals to justice can provoke reasonable fears and carry terrible costs. The people they help convict or sentence often are society's most ruthless. That's especially true in federal courts, where crimes of passion rarely surface. Federal cases tend to involve suspects whose alleged crimes are meticulously premeditated. These defendants often have two useful assets: smarts and treacherous allies.
We can't, and won't, theorize on whether some deadly deployment of those assets led to the murders Monday of U.S. District Judge Joan H. Lefkow's mother and husband on Chicago's North Side. Our hope is spare and resolute: that investigators learn who did this, and why. Until that occurs, we're left to wonder whether these slayings were assassinations intended to intimidate, or retaliate against, Judge Lefkow for rulings she has made.
Judges and prosecutors understand that their chosen profession puts them, and their loved ones, in harm's way. Ronald Allen, professor of criminal law at Northwestern University, says witnesses tend to be the most vulnerable; often they live on the same blocks as the people they're testifying against.
For officers of the court, Allen says, three axioms can help calibrate the risk of retaliation:
- Local judges and prosecutors typically deal with killers and other violent criminals who lack support networks of allies. In their criminal lives they're often loners without resources or mobility--and thus not often intimidating.
- Organized crime figures--mobsters or gang members--usually know better than to harm federal officials. "They realize they're in an equilibrium with law enforcement," Allen says. "If they harm a judge, the government can choose to come down hard on their organization." That's the last thing a criminal who's trying to protect an ongoing business enterprise--think rackets or narcotics--would ever want.
- Zealots and revolutionaries, by contrast, can be extraordinarily dangerous. They do have resources and mobility; many emerge from society's mainstream and would fit in anywhere. But because they don't have lucrative criminal enterprises they're desperate to protect, the government doesn't have as much leverage over them. Put short, they have less reason to pursue the civilized versions of cops and robbers.
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