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"Let me just play devil's advocate for a minute..."
Why? Is he paying you by the hour? Have you decided to take up his cause pro bono? I've always hated the phrase. My usual response is, "you don't have to do that, he has his own lawyer." There is no need for you, an idle contrarian, to offer a counter argument just for the sake of hearing it out loud. There's enough evil in this world willing to justify itself that I have no interest in sitting through a rhetorical exercise in getting at 'both sides' of a moral issue. In an online argument or at a social event, you can just excuse yourself from an interaction with someone who delights in inventing new counter-arguments to basic decency. But the guy no one wants to talk to at a party is only playing devil's advocate. The position exists and they're always hiring because when the devil goes to court, he's entitled to an attorney.
I got my first taste of courtroom drama in the aftermath of Unite the Right. I needed to understand and this seemed like the only solution on offer. I sat through arraignments and motions in limine, preliminary hearings and motions to dismiss; I learned about voir dire and jury instructions, sentencing guidelines and civil procedure. I sat quietly on wooden benches, pen in hand hunched over the notebook in my lap, and watched hundreds of hours of what was supposed to approximate justice. I wrote frantically in my notebook, my pen sometimes tearing through the page, to keep from screaming as a man in a suit offered up a defense for an attempted lynching in the same way he might argue a case about a bad check. I chewed the inside of my cheek, bit my tongue until it bled to keep from crying out from the gallery - this can't be right! There is an existential moral struggle playing out before us and the people's advocate for justice is armed with a manila folder? Verdicts come in, sentences are imposed. And the clerk calls the next case.
I spent years reading every filing in the federal civil lawsuit against the organizers of that deadly rally. I paid ten cents a page to read what hate had to say for itself. I sat alone in the magistrate judge's courtroom listening to hearings on motions played over speakerphone. I tried to square my skepticism about the ability of a system built on, by, and for white supremacy to reckon with the consequences of that ideology with the knowledge that the documents generated by this case were my window into this conspiracy. I gritted my teeth and transcribed every moment of the three week trial. The plaintiffs won their case, but the judgment has yet to be paid. No one was made whole again.
My work covering the criminal and civil aftermath of the Unite the Right rally inspired me to look beyond Charlottesville at what it looks like when hate goes on trial. These are not stories of the state coming to our defense by heroically prosecuting violent extremists, although there are plenty of prison sentences served. These are stories of imperfect justice hewn by an inadequate tool, told through affidavits and criminal complaints; these are the excuses offered for violence, the justifications of genocide, the protestations of 'just joking' and 'free speech' that are just jokes until the first shot is fired and a prosecutor's attempt to position that conduct on a sentencing matrix, doing actual math where there is an impossible moral calculus. These are stories of young men with 'promising futures' whose mothers write to the judge that if only you knew him, you'd know he didn't mean anything by it when he vandalized that synagogue. These are stories of civil rights litigators trying to leverage old anti-klan laws against 21st century fascist movements, of imprisoned extremists suing for their right to practice a white supremacist faith behind bars, and of feuding neo-nazis using the courts against each other.
The courts may not offer much in the face of evil, but they will let me read the property receipt for a search warrant served on guy with a shrine to Hitler in his gun room. I'm not offering answers, just a peek under the hood.
This is The Devil's Advocates, a newsletter about what happens when hate goes to court.
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