law and the law

I completed Kate Atkinson's Big Sky a few days ago, and am nearly finished with a non fiction book that deals with a similar issue.

Big Sky is the fifth Jackson Brodie novel.  Atkinson has written several books that do not involve Brodie, but the four that preceded Big Sky that did, were very well received and in my opinion, for good reason. Case Histories was the first and it is brilliant.  Then came One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News, and Started Early, Took My Dog. Case Histories was the best with three cases cleverly related.  And When Will There Be Good News has a message that is so powerful that it, in and of itself, makes the book worth reading.  If you are interested I've blogged about the Brodie books before.

This one, Big Sky, is not as good as the others. To me, it reads like her publisher said, "They want Brodie, give us Brodie" and Atkinson after resisting for a spell said "Fine, you want Brodie I'll give you Brodie." But her heart wasn't in it.

However, it does bring up a point that is present in the other book I mentioned, Furious Hours. I've got about 40 pages to go in it, but the section that deals with the common question has already passed. I am not giving anything away with this following brief synopsis.

There is a man in Alabama, a reverend no less, who is killing off his kin. He is doing it for the insurance checks. He takes out insurance on his wife, and then kills his wife, and collects the insurance. Then he remarries, takes out insurance on his second wife, and kills his second wife and collects the insurance. And he does it to other family members as well. Remember this is NON fiction. This really happened.

The insurance companies are, go figure, reluctant to pay up.  The Reverend hires a lawyer who initially is able to get a not guilty verdict on a murder, and subsequently successfully defends the reverend's rights to collect on the insurance policies.  After the reverend knocks off a step daughter, at the funeral of the step daughter, a man stands up and, at the funeral home, shoots the Reverend.  The shooter then hires the same lawyer that defended the reverend to acquit the shooter for murdering the reverend.  And the lawyer is successful. Again remember this is non fiction. All this really happened.  The last part of the book, the part I have not fully completed is about Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, who intended to write her second book about this case.

Question is this: is a person innocent of killing someone if the victim was a nogoodnik like the reverend? In Big Sky at the end there is a similar ethical challenge.  If a slime ball is killed by a decent person, is the killer someone who authorities should let go.  Readers of To Kill a Mockingbird with a long memory, may recall that the bad guy is killed by Boo Radley, an innocent, and the sheriff encourages those who witnessed the killing, to not press charges against Boo.

Are there laws and laws?  Is the reverend's killer a hero?  Are good guys responsible for killing bad guys?  And if so, how can we be sure that those who assess a bad guy to be a bad guy, have an accurate read on the character. What if the bad guys are the good guys, and the good guys are the bad guys.  Lynchings in the south were incomprehensibly regular in the early and middle 20th century. Probably a sheriff or two who felt that the killers were not bad guys at all.