American Justice: Revenge Dressed Up As Self-Defense

WASHINGTON - What if Oedipus went on trial in L.A. for murdering his father? And what if Delilah were tried in Manassas, Va., for cutting off her lover's manhood? Well, now we know. Both would claim years of abuse (child, marital), invoke self-defense, and move to acquit. Welcome to American justice, '90s-style.

The Menendez brothers are on trial in L.A. for murdering their parents, (a hung jury ended one proceeding); Lorena Bobbitt in Manassas for sexually mutilating her husband. Two sensational trials, one primordial theme. The theme is revenge. But since the law does not recognize revenge as justification for murder and mutilation, revenge is now dressed up as self-defense.

The Menendez brothers, who after murdering their parents went on a spending spree that included Rolex watches and a $70,000 Porsche, claim they killed out of fear for their lives. They had been sexually abused for many years and now their parents were going to kill them.

Lorena Bobbitt similarly claims sexual and mental abuse. Although a jury acquitted her husband in a previous trial of marital rape on the night he was attacked, her lawyer insisted in her opening statement that it was "his penis versus her life" (a stark summation of feminist victimization theory). The Bobbitt story, Samson and Delilah without the delicacy of metaphor, becomes a tale of self-defense.

Now, self-defense used to mean shooting someone who is about to shoot you first, or some variation thereof. But John Wayne Bobbitt, the alleged aggressor, was asleep at the time he was attacked. And the Menendez parents were in their TV room eating ice cream when the boys came in with shotguns and blew them away. It is an odd sort of self-defense where only the defender is armed. It is even odder when only the defender is awake.

Nonetheless, however implausible the claim of self-defense, it is highly useful. It allows the introduction of the most lurid allegations of sexual abuse. These engender sympathy for the defendant and make the dead and the maimed look like monsters who got their just deserts.

In fact, these are cases not of self-defense but of revenge. And not just any revenge. This is politically correct revenge. Wife and child abuse are the crimes of the day. Fighting them, avenging them, indeed just exposing them are deemed acts not just of courage but of high purpose, "empowering" the powerless.

Hence Vanity Fair runs a sultry photo spread of Lorena Bobbitt and declares her "a national folk heroine." Imagine that, say, some elderly battered husband, having long been abused by his wife, grabbed a knife and, Bobbitt-like, cut off her breasts. Is it possible to imagine such a man becoming a national folk hero? Of course not. His act would not have the weight of feminist rage behind it. It could not be seen as symbolically avenging years, centuries, of oppression. His crime, politically meaningless, would be seen not as an act of liberation, but as a mere abomination.

When Janet Reno was confronted at the press conference following the Waco disaster with the consequences of the attack she had ordered on the Branch Davidians, what was her first reaction? She tried to buttress her disastrous decision by saying that she had received information about child abuse among the Davidians.

She subsequently backed off the claim. Yet her initial reaction was revealing. Faced with more than 85 dead, many of whom were innocent, she invoked the crime of the day, the most politically and psychologically explosive charge she could level at David Koresh: child abuse. It may have been a slaughter, but think of what it was meant to stop.

This is essentially what the Menendez brothers and Mrs. Bobbitt are saying. These two trials, truly mythic in scope, get us down to very basic things. The defense in each would overturn perhaps the most fundamental principle of law: that the law does not sanction revenge. Indeed, the very purpose of law is to put an end to revenge.

The point of a criminal trial is to take retribution out of the hands of the victim and of the relatives. To allow personal revenge is to assure endless violence and permanent insecurity. When standards of retribution are not general but personal, no one knows when, whence, even why, the next blow will come.

The purpose of criminal law is to transcend personal revenge by meting out justice in public forums, according to publicly agreed criteria, adjudicated publicly by disinterested parties.

The Menendez and the Bobbitt cases - assuming the tales of previous victimization are true - represent attempts to justify the most primitive revenge under the guise of self-defense. If they succeed, we will have taken political correctness to its ultimate extreme, to the point where for those who claim politically correct victimization, the laws no longer apply. Vengeance is the Lord's - and Lorena's.

(Copyright, 1994, Washington Post Writers Group)

Charles Krauthammer's column appears Monday on editorial pages of The Times.