Free Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver

“Are you telling me to plead guilty?”
    â€œLook, we’ve been over that. When I’m ready to advise you to cop out you’ll know it. Right now I want you to realize what you’re up against, man.”
    The Lieutenant blinked his eyes thoughtfully. “I’m busy realizing,” he said.
    â€œTry to look at it this way, Lieutenant,” I went on, warmed to my lecture. “Just as murder itself is one of the most elemental and primitive of crimes, so also the law of murder is, for all the torrent of words written about it, still pretty elemental and primitive in its basic concepts. The human tribe learned early that indiscriminate killing was not only poor for tribal decorum and well-being but threatened its very survival and was therefore bad in itself. So murder became taboo. Are you still with me?”
    â€œGo on.”
    â€œAt the same time it was seen that there were occasions when a killing might nevertheless still be justified. Stated most baldly it all pretty much boiled down to this: Thou shalt not kill—except to save yourself, your property, or your loved ones. That simple statement still embraces by far most of the modern defenses to murder. If a man tries to take my life or my wife or my cow I may kill him to prevent it. But if I chase him off or, more like your situation, if he should steal my wife or my cow while I am away fishing (or sleeping in my trailer) I must pursue other tribal remedies when I discover it. I must do so because I did not catch him at it, the damage is
done, the danger is past, the culprit may be dealt with later and at leisure.
    â€œYou will observe that this catching-him-at-it business involves the important factor of time, of time sequence, that I just mentioned. Even the ‘unwritten law’ defense you brought up usually involves the notion of a cuckolded husband discovering his wife in the nuptial bed with the iceman. Or perhaps these days it’s the deep-freeze man. In any case nearly all of these defense-of-property-and-person murder defenses—‘self-help’ defenses they may be called—involve the idea of the person who is killed being caught in the act, red-handed, before there is time for the killer to call for help or complain to the tribal elders—the police in our times. Is it seeping through?”
    The Lieutenant nodded glumly.
    â€œThe notion that one might later, after the fact, go kill the cow or wife stealer was rejected by most early tribal men as it is still widely rejected today. It was and is rejected because the ‘defending’ killer has had time to cool off, the thing is over and done, the emergency no longer exists, the offender can be punished at leisure and in an orderly way, and, finally, probably because such a defense is less susceptible of unbiased confirmation and thus opens the door to being invented. Anyway, one may lawfully kill another to save his wife or his cow or his own life but not to punish the doer after it is all over. Now my anthropology may possibly be a little haywire but not my law. The law says that the business of punishment must be left solely to it, which is the People.
    â€œApplying all this to your own situation, Lieutenant, whatever happened to your wife was over and done when you found it out. You could not save her; she’d had it, her danger was past; and if Barney Quill raped her he could have been dealt with by due proc ess of law. It so happens that rape and murder both carry life sentences in this state, but not death. By your action you usurped the law and imposed the death penalty on Barney Quill. Society, the tribe, now seeks to punish you for breaking one of its most ancient and basic taboos.”
    We sat silently, the Lieutenant again sipping his mustache. He looked a little morose. “But can’t the jury let me go, whatever the damned law is?” he asked.
    â€œOf course it can,” I said. “And juries often do. But