Free Unfair by Adam Benforado

encountering a harm, examining its contours, trying to make sense of it.And as I began writing this book, I spent hours poring over photographs like these four, taken in New Zealand between 1887 and 1890.
    I am not alone in feeling the magnetic pull of these images. There are books and gallery exhibitions, government databases and private collections, eBay auctions, CNN slideshows, and dedicated websites all devoted to mug shots. They are ubiquitous: our most wanted and our least wanted.
    Part of the allure is pure voyeurism, of course.The Internet provides a titillating assortment of “hot mug shots” and “weepy mug shots” and “face tattoo mug shots”—and separate pages of celebrities and people with strange haircuts and people who have felt the strong arm of the law. We can gape at their eyes, painted up Cleopatra-style or swollen shut. But there is something more to it, I think.
    These faces—and bodies—offer the possibility of uncovering the signs and causes of criminality.
    When something awful has happened, we search for the harbingers that might have warned us away. And we seek the origins of the harm: we want to know what could lead a person to light a home on fire, shoot a man in the back, or sexually abuse a child.
    Look again at the four New Zealanders.The rapist was the man on the far left, Frank Masters.The others in the lineup committed simple property crimes: from left to right, John Powell (sentenced to two years in prison for killing a sheep in order to steal the carcass), Alick Evan McGregor (one month for larceny), and William Johnston, the tightrope walker (three months for larceny).Masters was a serial sex offender, having been convicted at least four times between 1885 and 1888 for indecency—more specifically, “indecent exposure in the presence of young girls.”
    Though all of those affected by Masters’s crime—the victim and her parents, the jurors, the judge, the surrounding communityof Wellington—are long since dead, the rape of a child still unsettles us. What drove this manMasters? What was wrong with him? We burn to know, but there are few avenues to pursue.
    Even if we could trade places with the Crown Prosecutor back in December 1889, we still wouldn’t have access to what Masters was thinking when he committed the crime. His real motives, his capacities, his impulses—they remain today as they were then: shrouded behind a bearded face, dark eyes, a bald head.
    At trial, Masters’s explanation for his terrible acts was one of compulsion, but the evidence before the judge and jury was difficult to parse.During his fourth trial for indecency, Masters had asserted “that he was not master of himself when he committed the offences, and knew nothing about them until he was arrested.”And at the suggestion of his lawyer, the Court ordered that Masters “be medically examined as to his sanity.”Nonetheless, Dr. Johnston, the Gaol Medical Officer, “found him to be…sane, but of filthy habits.”
    So, despite Masters’s pleas to the Court “to have steps taken to prevent him from doing such things again,” he was not long thereafter released, and promptly went out and raped a child.
    At his sentencing for that crime, Masters launched into “an extraordinary and wandering statement, speaking in lachrymose tones for upwards of 25 minutes,” according to the newspaper report. “He couldn’t help himself [he said], for he must be a lunatic—a thorough madman.”In addition to “suggesting that he should be ‘chained hand and foot’ in a lunatic asylum, [he] proposed a drastic remedy that would effectually prevent his repeating the crime.”He wanted to do good, “to get married and lead a proper life, and not go on in this way,” but there was something—his nature, his destiny—that brought trouble into his life again and again.The reporter who recounted the trial thought Masters was putting on a show: “That he was acting a part there could be little