As anyone who has read this site for any length of time (heck, since this morning) knows, I’m a huge fan of 24. It’s entertaining escapist nonsense that, until the most recent season, held my interest with a perpetual series of increasingly ridiculous cliffhangers and increasingly grandiose action sequences.
Of course, this isn’t a huge problem insofar as I’m not a Supreme Court Justice using the show’s fiction as the basis for jurisprudence. Unlike, say, Antonin Scalia.
“Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent’s rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.
“Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. “Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?’ Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.”
Our country is in the hands of sociopaths.
—andrew
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So inane, from you to Sullivan to even the Canadian newspaper that covered the conference, although they at least acknowledged Scalia’s true intention: to start a discussion weighing the traditional stadards of exigency and human rights. They also managed to mention, though in passing, what seems the most salient point: that Scalia is one of the more vocal and understandable opponents of “blank check”-ism and the holding of enemy combatants without a hearing. There is a balance to be had, and if Jack Bauer can do better to bridge the gap between jurists from dozens of countries than arcane country specific cases can, I don’t think it makes sense to impugn a very smart guy for suggesting not what he believes jurisprudence should be, but what it is. Jack Bauer would NOT be convicted, if he got to openly face trial and not simply be disappeared himself.
Posted Tuesday, June 19, 2007 at 3:08 pm | Permalink
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