“‘Then he doesn’t know right from wrong, is that what you mean? The legal definition of insanity?’
“‘No. I’m sure he knows right from wrong quite acutely. He’s probably more of a moralist and less of a hypocrite than most of us.’
“Dr. Perrine is a tall man, bald with a white monk’s fringe clasping his skull above the ears. He talks with vast lunges and gestures; his hands describe large arcs as he talks. He has a commanding Presence, a great force of personality; it is easy to see why he is in such demand as a witness at dramatic trials. At this point in the interview he pulled his chair over close to me on its casters, leaned forward and tapped me on the knee. ‘He’s less inhibited, that’s the controlling factor. He shares that quality with the criminals he assassinates. Most of us have the gut reaction now and then—we see a crime take place, or we hear of one, and we think to ourselves, “I’d have killed the son of a bitch.” But we don’t kill anyone. We’re conditioned against it, and we believe it’s wrong to descend to the criminals’ level because there has to be a difference between us and them. Look, most of us are all right as long as we don’t know the worst for sure. We can pretend. We can stay on the tightrope because we’ve erected sufficient defenses against the hopelessness that inspires this violence in our society. Most of us really don’t want to know the things that have set this man to killing his fellow men.’
“Dr. Perrine halved his professional smile; his words fell heavily, dropped like shoes, spaced out, as though he were lecturing to a class of first-year Med students. ‘He’s a benighted idealist, really; I would judge he’s a man who has seen injustice and frustration to an unbearable degree. His experience has made him hate criminals enough to be willing to destroy himself if he can take some of them down with him. It’s an idée fixe, with him; he’s filled with rage and he’s found a way to channel his rage into action. He’s transfixed by this obsessive hate.
“‘But I see no signs that it’s interfered with his capacity to reason. Take, for example, the fact that all his victims—or all we know about, anyway—have been killed with the same gun. Now guns aren’t that difficult to obtain, unfortunately. He could easily have used a different murder weapon each time. He didn’t. Why? Because he wants us to know he’s out there. It’s a message to the city, a warning cry.’
“‘Like the come-and-get-me phone calls of that mad killer in San Francisco?’
“‘No. You mean the Zodiac killer. No, I would judge that one is truly psychotic. He’s probably pointed a loaded revolver at his own head and found he couldn’t pull the trigger; ever since, he’s gone around looking for someone who’ll do the job for him. No, our man here is not self-destructive—or to be more precise, that’s not his primary motivation. What he’s trying to do is to alert the rest of us to a danger he believes we aren’t sufficiently concerned with. He’s saying to us it’s wrong to throw up our hands and pretend nothing can be done about crime in the streets. He believes there is something we can do—and he believes he’s showing us what it is.
“‘It’s rather like the legend of the Emperor’s New Clothes, isn’t it. The legend has value only because it includes one naïve honest child who’s frank and uninhibited enough to announce that the Emperor is wearing no clothes. As soon as there’s no longer a single honest child to proclaim the truth, the legend loses its meaning.’
“The smile, this time, is deprecatory. ‘I shouldn’t like to give the impression that I regard this man as a brave valiant savior holding back crime in the city like a boy with his finger in the dike. Too many people are beginning to idolize him that way. Actually he’s only contributing to the chaotic anarchy of which, God knows, we have more than enough. In terms of practical effect, these killings of his are having about as much effect on the total crime picture as you’d get by administering two aspirin tablets to a rabid wolf. I hope you’ll emphasize this point in your article. It’s no good condoning any of this man’s actions, it’s no good trying to put a high moral tone on them. The man’s a murderer.’
“‘In that connection, doctor, I’ve heard it said that the vigilante cares less about seeing people dead than he cares about watching them dying. The argument goes, if he really wants justice why doesn’t he cruise the streets with an infra-red camera and take pictures of these criminals in the act, instead of shooting them dead in their tracks?’
“‘I’ve heard the same thing, even from some of my own colleagues. But I think that argument misses the point. This is a man who’s been deeply grieved and distressed by some intimate and violent experience. Now if you give a man a universe of pain to live in, he’ll do anything he can to get out. I would guess this man has already tried formal justice and found it wanting. He’s not concerned with bringing criminals to trial, he’s concerned with averting immediate dangers immediately—by removing the miscreants in the most positive and final way possible.’
“‘You think perhaps he was the victim of a crime and saw the criminal thrown out of court, something like that?’
“‘Quite possibly, yes. If you know our courts at all you must have seen occasions when a case the prosecution has spent months of agony to build is destroyed by one misguided witness who cuts through all their reasoned legal arguments simply because he doesn’t like the color of the prosecutor’s necktie or he had a sister who resembled the defendant’s mother. Our legal system is a shambles, we all know that. Punishment, to deter, must be immediate and impartial, and in our courts it is neither. I have a distinct feeling this man knows that firsthand; he’s probably been the victim of it.’
“For a psychiatrist Dr. Perrine seems to have a few unorthodox ideas. I put that to him: ‘Isn’t it more common for members of your profession to side with the defendants? Crime is a disease to be treated, and all that?’
“‘I don’t subscribe to those old shibboleths. Personally. I tend to believe the so-called humanitarian approaches have added greatly to the suffering of society as a whole. We have laws because we need to protect ourselves. To break those laws is to injure society. I long ago gave up believing in the therapeutic approach to crime, except in those cases where you’ve got a demonstrably curable case of aberrant behavior—certain sex offenses, for example, that are known to be curable by various drug treatments or psychotherapies. But we’ve gone much too far in the baby-bathwater direction. The function of punishment is not to reform the criminal, it’s to protect society by preventing and deterring certain types of misbehavior. The original idea behind putting offenders in jail was simply to get them off the streets and thereby prevent them from committing any more crimes during the period of their punishment. Capital punishment was the same in theory, except of course that its effect was permanent. If I had to hazard a guess I’d say this is our “vigilante’s” primary objective—to prevent these people from committing any more crimes. The primary goal of protecting society seems to be what many of us have forgotten in our rush to safeguard the rights of accused persons—and perhaps that’s what this man is trying to remind us of.’
“Dr. Perrine pushed his chair back and stood up. He spoke slowly again, choosing his words; the act of standing up was deliberate, I’m sure, intended to emphasize what he was going to say.
“‘This man has spent his life as a liberal of good conscience. I’m convinced of it. And now he’s reacting against many things he’s been taught—principal among those things being the idea of tolerance. He’s come to realize that tolerance isn’t always a virtue—tolerance of evil can be an evil itself. He feels he is at war, and as Edmund Burke put it, ‘Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary.’ To this man his private war is the ultimate necessity. Otherwise he wouldn’t have started it—he’d have been too frightened. He’s a very frightened man.’