A principle becomes considerably less convenient when someone you cannot stand needs it.
On September 4, the Justice Department announced that ICE officer Christian Castro had been indicted on six counts of making false statements to the FBI about a January encounter in Minneapolis. Its account of the indictment alleges that he fired through a closing doorway and wounded a man, then misrepresented the confrontation. These are allegations awaiting adjudication. Justice Department announcement.
Castro's attorneys told the Associated Press that he intended to plead not guilty. That distinction matters: AP corrected its report to make clear that court records did not indicate he entered that plea at Friday's hearing. AP reporting.
Already there is enough here to make two different audiences impatient. One may want to know why an immigration officer is being treated as a suspect. Another may want to know why we are still carefully saying “alleged.” The impatience is understandable. It also presents a useful place to examine what we mean by justice.
If a public official lies about using force, that demands accountability. If an official is accused of lying, the accusation still has to be proved. A wounded person's life matters before we learn anything about his usefulness to an immigration argument. An accused person's rights remain his even when protecting them irritates people whose concerns we share.
Keeping all of that in view takes more effort than picking the person whose humanity our side will defend.
There is a familiar historical echo. After British soldiers killed five civilians in Boston in 1770, John Adams joined their defense. In the soldiers' trial, six were acquitted and two convicted of manslaughter. The National Park Service recounts fear on both sides: that anger would prevent a fair hearing, or that influence would allow the accused to escape one. National Park Service history.
That history supplies no verdict for Minneapolis. The evidence and circumstances are different. Its usefulness is in the difficulty it preserves: people who have reasons to distrust one another still need a process capable of hearing what happened.
Adams could take the defense without making the deaths unimportant. We can demand an honest investigation without announcing the result in advance. Neither obligation becomes disposable because the other is difficult to carry.
The temptation is to release the tension by releasing a person from consideration. Someone becomes an invader, a thug, a traitor, a useful victim. Once the description has done its work, we can stop being troubled by what happens to him. Our preferred noun has settled the moral account.
Or we can release the tension by declaring that everyone is corrupt and nothing will change. That position can feel worldly and clear-eyed. It asks very little of us. The people who still need a truthful record and a fair hearing do not become less real because we have grown tired of the argument.
One possible future follows those habits. Every new filing becomes ammunition. An inconvenient fact is buried, a useful mistake is circulated, and a correction feels like surrender. The case may reach a legal conclusion while the public learns to trust only the version that flatters its loyalties. We would leave ourselves even less able to face the next contested event together.
There is another path, and it has an unglamorous entrance. Read the actual allegation. Distinguish the evidence from the conclusion you hope it supports. Correct a false account when it comes from someone you like. Keep asking whether the injured person can obtain care and a hearing, and whether the accused can answer the charge. Those are practical commitments. They can be made before the case is resolved.
The cost is social. Someone may hear your insistence on a fair process as insufficient loyalty. Someone else may treat your concern for the injured man as hostility to law enforcement. Holding your ground with both people requires more than an especially balanced sentence.
For Christians, there is a further surrender here. We can ask Jesus for the courage to remain answerable to truth and to the people in front of us, including the ones our circle would prefer us to stop seeing. We can act on what has become clear while entrusting what we cannot control to Him. That gives us work to do without pretending the final judgment belongs to us.
Most of us will practice it unevenly. A correction, an apology, or a refusal to pass along a gratifying falsehood may be the faithful thing available today.