STOP THE EVIL CHICKEN BUTCHERS : EQUAL CHICKEN RIGHTS NOW

THE CHICKENS SPEAK

By : Mr. Woodrow D. Beakman, L.L.M., a Chicken; Escapee, Selma (Alabama) Poultry Processing Plant; Formerly Known as a "Grade D Fryer - Strong Style;" Self-taught in English and Human Communication; Avian; Honorary Master's Degree Holder in Human Rights Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C. (2008); Author, "Fried Chicken Holocaust : America is a Death House for Birds Everywhere" (Forthcoming, HarperCollins™ 2010).

America is a great Nation because it respects life. It fights for dignity and freedom abroad. It believes that all living creatures have a right to exist. America trusts life because it knows that life represents potential greatness for all. Life is good. It is worth saving. In short, America stands up for life.

Yet America has failed to stand up for life when it comes to chickens. To the contrary, America has committed heinous crimes against chickens everywhere. In every State, America allows men to ruthlessly imprison, mistreat, pluck, murder, slaughter, dismember, disembowel and process helpless chickens on an industrial scale. Worse, America even encourages bloodthirsty criminals to butcher chickens in the name of "commercial advancement."

This is an outrage against life and dignity. As chickens, we demand that America cease its genocidal campaign against us at once. We may be chickens. But we are people, too. We deserve to live just as much as a brain-dead human child or an endangered humpback whale. We refuse to allow our brethren to die in poultry slaughterhouses so that greedy profiteers can sell our breasts, thighs, wings and gullets. We refuse to allow our mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers to end their existence beer-basted and fried at the bottom of some God-forsaken Styrofoam bucket. Put simply, we demand that America respect all life--including chicken life.

Why does America refuse to see us? Indeed, America seems almost willfully blind concerning our daily ordeals. Rather than express outrage over our horrific treatment, Americans actually praise the men who orchestrate our slaughter. Just last week, for example, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece analyzing the "highly successful business model" employed by two notorious chicken butchers: Harlan David "Colonel" Sanders and his protégé Dave Thomas. According to the Journal, these two "entrepreneurs" devised an "exemplary food processing and delivery system," in addition to creating "a shrewd marketing scheme designed to maximize consumer interest in chicken meals." As a result, said the Journal, "Sanders and Thomas stand as giants in the business community." In conclusion: "Every food service entrepreneur should study the Sanders/Thomas Method well."

Giants in the business community? Exemplary food processing and delivery systems? Sanders/Thomas Method? Does the Journal even understand what made these men "giants?" Does any American really understand what methods made these men "successful?"

Sanders and Thomas are not heroes. Rather, they are evil chicken butchers who scorn life. They achieved their "success" by purposely breeding, corralling, beheading, gutting and packaging millions of innocent chickens. Yet Americans celebrate these butchers every day, not just in the Wall Street Journal, but also in rundown chicken shacks from coast to coast. Every day, Americans sing praises to Sanders and Thomas as they greedily feast on the flesh of our kin.

This is not dignity. This is not respect for life. This is genocide.

According to international law, "genocide" means the intentional killing of any identifiable ethnic, national, racial or religious group because of animus against that group. Chickens are a racial group. Our genetic combinations result in a unique racial identity. Racially, we are chickens. And because villains like Sanders and Thomas hunt us down and kill us because we are racially chicken, that makes them genocidal mass murderers, not entrepreneurs.

America should think long and hard about glorifying these killers. It should think about its principles. After all, America prosecuted Nazi war criminals for genocide after World War II. It prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic for "ethnic cleansing" in Yugoslavia. It even investigated Iraqi officials who allegedly killed minorities in that country. Hollywood superstars have lobbied for aid to Darfur, where ethnic groups make war on each other.

In short, America says it cares about stopping genocide. Why, then, does it call "Colonel" Sanders an "entrepreneur" rather than a chicken-slaughtering thug? America says it recoils from systematic, racially-motivated killings worldwide. Why, then, can it not see that chickens endure racially-motivated killing every single day? Chicken genocide proceeds on an unimaginable scale. Only 400,000 Rwandans perished in that country's genocide. Yet billions of chickens have been left writhing to die in grime-covered barrels since America took a liking to "Original Recipe" hot wings. And that's just in America. Other countries like to eat us, too. China, for instance, does not just violate human rights. It massively violates chicken rights, too. Put simply, no human genocide in history can compare to the intentional butchery chickens have suffered.

Chickens deserve to live the American dream. They deserve a chance to live in peace, prosper, propagate and find some happiness before they die. America guarantees that dream to all humans who live in its borders. It also says that all life is valuable. If that is true, why does America condemn chickens to systematic exploitation, pain and death? What about a young chicken's dream? Don't chickens get a chance to go to school, find love, work at a job and go to the movies on weekends? Don’t chickens get a chance to raise children and find meaning in life? Humans do. Why not chickens? We are living, breathing creatures, too. We have cells and brains. Our brains may not be as large as men's brains. But that is no reason to pluck us alive, cut our throats, batter us, fry us and feed us to a Little League team along with Grape Soda and potato salad.

We are more valuable than vegetables. We are living, breathing avians, not plants. We are not inanimate turnips or cabbage heads. Put simply, it is morally wrong for America to discriminate against us because we have feathers and small brains. We have webbed feet and gizzards. So what? America says it values diversity. Yet it kills us because we have gizzards and humans do not. America can benefit from all life, including creatures with gizzards. The fact that we have gizzards does not make us inferior. We are no less alive than a college professor or a superstar athlete. We all breathe the same air. We all give birth to young. True, we lay eggs and humans pop children out alive. But our distinctive reproductive methods are no reason to slaughter us and eat us; they are part of "who we are."

Federal law and the United States Constitution prohibit discrimination based upon reproductive capacity. It is no answer, then, to say that "chickens deserve differential treatment" simply because they lay eggs. In a word, America says it values equality. Like humans, we are "living things." Viewed in that light, we are equal. We demand EQUALITY NOW.

But this debate is not just about the law. This debate is about America's conscience. After all, how can America continue preaching about equality, dignity and "respect for life" when it condemns an entire segment of its living population to industrialized slaughter? How can America maintain its moral rectitude when it sets aside an entire segment of its living population to be greedily eaten along with sweet-n-sour sauce, cole slaw and biscuits? And how can it maintain its respect for individual autonomy when it refuses to allow chickens to form their own identities?

Every chicken is special. We refuse to be labeled "Grade A Fryers," "Finger-Lickin' Drumsticks," "Nuggets" or "Dark Meat Specials." We are unique individuals with thoughts, dreams and desires. America exists to allow every living individual to reach his maximal potential in all things. America exists to protect everyone's right to live. In that light, we demand that America live up to its principles. It must stop praising chicken butchers like "Colonel" Sanders and Dave Thomas. It must stop dooming our relatives to frozen death in microwave dinner boxes. In short, how is it American to allow a human to go to college and prosper, while allowing a chicken to live a wretched existence before being thrown into a steel plucking machine?

It is time to stand up for what is right. It is time to stand up for life. Chickens have so much to contribute to American life. We do not just exist to die and fill human stomachs. We do not just exist to peck around farmyards and cluck. No, we are living, breathing creatures. We can achieve great things. And if America cares about stopping genocide, it can start by bringing men like Sanders and Thomas to justice, not calling them "successful food industry entrepreneurs."

There is nothing "entrepreneurial" about mass murder. As chickens in a Republic that values diversity in all living things, we demand a voice. We refuse to be exterminated, chopped up, bagged and drowned in barbecue sauce any longer.

That is not our destiny. And that is no way to treat an entire race in America.

WHOM WOULD YOU RATHER KILL? A MAN OR A DOG?

OESTERHOUDT STRIKES

We learn from earliest childhood that "killing is bad." We have a natural moral sense that ending lives is generally not a good (and certainly not a nice) thing to do. Along the same lines, we learn that "life is valuable." We especially learn this when it comes to human lives. Animal lives are, well, not as valuable.

Some people genuinely take these lessons to heart. Abortion opponents, for instance, say that "all potential life is valuable." That means that not just full-grown adults do not deserve to die, but also tiny cell clusters that might one day develop into fetuses. Some even think that any potential life is valuable. But this reaches into absurdity. After all, every ejaculation and ovulation cycle represents "potential life." Surely it is neither sin nor murder to have a period or to ejaculate without an intention to procreate.

But all "life rhetoric" is vexingly biased. After all, who speaks up for non-human life? All cellular organisms are "alive." They all "die" when their necessary cellular functions cease. Is it somehow distressing, then, when a cow dies? How about a cockroach? Or a tree? These things are all "life." Yet no one marches to stop "tree murder," and no one wails when a raccoon dies in the wilderness. Put simply, when people say they "believe in life," they really mean that they believe in "human life." After all, people have an interest in staying alive. From a biological perspective, no living creature wants to die. A few people, of course, want to kill themselves. In the aggregate, however, most living humans want to stay alive.

Despite all this, even those who feverishly "defend human life" are not absolutists. Even people who fight tooth and nail to defend the unborn--or lament wasted sperm--have exceptions to their rule. After all, many people think that some human life is not worth preserving. When a man "deserves" to die, even the staunchest life defenders do not intervene to save him. I always found it amusing that most abortion defenders support capital punishment. I find it even more amusing that some particularly fiery abortion defenders murder doctors in order to prevent abortions. How's that for a problematic principle? All life is precious; but some people deserve to be killed. It's enough to boggle one's mind--or even laugh, if it weren't so serious.

Perhaps it is not so surprising after all. In fact, I venture that most people actually have little problem killing their fellow man. In fact, I think most people would have an easier time killing a man than a "lesser life form," like a dog or a deer. Despite all the things we learn about killing others, I think most people just need to be pushed far enough in order to kill another human being. And not just kill--gleefully kill.

And that's the difference: Men must be pushed to kill another person. Only human beings have the capacity to taunt, insult, degrade, abuse and denigrate their fellows. They can cause untold misery to one another, both physically and psychologically. The urge to kill builds in proportion to the misery a person endures at another's hands. Sometimes it does not even take that much to push a person over the edge. Think about road rage killings and drunken barroom squabbles. Men exchange words. Their emotions fly off the handle. Next thing you know, someone is dead. In other cases, a person suffers chronic abuse and finally snaps. Consider the beaten wife who just can't take it any more and slits her husband's throat while he sleeps.

In short, people kill each other for comparatively little. Maybe life is not that sacred after all.

But the same people who gladly kill their fellow man might have trouble killing a puppy dog. After all, people who kill over abuse or petty arguments do so because humans have a unique ability to arouse enmity in one another. In the moment before a man stabs a rival who insulted his girlfriend, he thinks: "I'm gonna kill this fucking asshole." In other words, the human capacity for intent leads men to kill each other. It even makes killing easy in the right circumstances.

Not so with a dog. Why would anyone want to kill an innocent little puppy? Everyone knows that a puppy can't cause any harm. It can't lie, deceive, insult, connive, abuse, beat, torture or tyrannize. It can do none of the things that arouse homicidal rage in human beings. If it came between an innocent puppy dog and a hated tormentor who slaps and insults you all day for weeks on end, I don't think I'm stretching to suggest that most people would much rather kill the man than the dog.

In a word, it is facetious to claim that "all human life is sacred." Our own behavior proves us wrong when we do. The truth is that human beings drive us crazy from time to time. They drive us so crazy, in fact, that we become all too willing to kill them if the circumstances impel us. Only humans have the capacity to arouse such furious, homicidal rages. Puppies have no such capacity. That is why-- if given the choice--I think most people would rather kill a detested, tyrannical person than an innocent dog.

TRUTH IN THE NEWS?

AN ESSAY

Last week, I read an interesting little article in the New York Daily News. See L.I. dad slain uptown, N.Y. Daily News, July 17, 2009. Newspaper reporting interests me not so much for what the writers disclose, but rather for what they do not disclose. Ironically, newspapers ask readers to accept their reports as “truth,” even though close inspection reveals myriad unanswered questions in every article. Even the smallest, most insignificant news stories often conceal luscious “subtexts.” In the past, I rarely thought about subtext. Now that I’ve gained some experience in life, I see that subtext is far more important than printed words. In the end, I never fully trust a news report. I simply use it as a basis from which to draw my own conclusions, applying my own experience and memory to the “facts” presented. In short, I do not rely on the news for “truth.”

So how exactly does “subtext” work? And how do news outlets warp perceptions? Let’s examine L.I. dad slain uptown. It’s a short article. The reporters tell us that a “motivational speaker from Valley Stream, Long Island” named Jeffrey Locker, 52, drove into Manhattan last Wednesday afternoon. He was white. We know this because the News includes a picture next to the headline. We then learn that two young “neighborhood people” in East Harlem (a largely black and Hispanic neighborhood) saw Locker walking into a Deli on Second Avenue at around 3 A.M. Immediately thereafter, they saw him exit the Deli carrying a bottle of water and “some Trojan condoms.” One witness told the reporters that he looked “cool, relaxed.” Two hours later, the same “young people” saw Locker in the driver’s seat of his 2007 Dodge Magnum. On closer inspection, they saw that his hands were tied behind him and there was a cord around his neck. He was dead. According to the “police report,” he had been “strangled and stabbed.”

Upon reading these “facts,” I made my own conclusions. Here was an affluent white man with a successful career as a “motivational speaker.” He lived in the suburbs with his wife and three children. So what could possibly draw him to East Harlem at 3 A.M., park his station wagon on the street, then buy condoms and water? The News does not speculate. But is it not obvious? It is a well-known urban truism that affluent white men often drive into “bad neighborhoods” for drugs and sex. They patronize prostitutes. They buy crack cocaine. They pay for all the “wild things” they cannot get in their “respectable neighborhoods.” They indulge. Then they get on the parkway and head back to their wives and “respectable lives.” Their wives inevitably ask: “Why are you so late?” To which comes the familiar reply: “Oh, I got held over at work.” Why else would this man have been East Harlem? And why else would he have bought condoms? To make water balloons?

You might ask how I know this. My answer: I’ve seen it happen. When I lived in Chicago, there was a “skid row” near my apartment a few blocks from some busy nightclubs. These clubs drew the seedy as well as the trendy. Not everyone went to the clubs; in fact, most came simply to “mill around the streets.” Some preyed on drunk kids staggering home. Women donned high heels and hot pants to attract “business.” And then there was a cadre of wig-wearing black transvestites who flagged down cars and hopped into passenger seats. Most of these cars were “suburban:” station wagons, family-edition SUVs, sports cars. The drivers were all white. They were suburban men who came into the city for “exciting hookups” thinking no one back home would ever know. In short, I know from experience that white men often visit cities in order to get “exciting sex” that they never get at home during their “respectable lives.”

I could not ignore experience when reading about Jeffrey Locker. Nor could I ignore my cynical assumption that suburban white men do not go to poor black neighborhoods for saintly purposes. Perhaps the News did not explicitly mention why Locker was in East Harlem at 3 A.M., but expected readers to make their own conclusions. That may be so. But the report contained some other “facts” that cut against this interpretation. These “facts” try to paint Locker as an “innocent victim,” not someone who knowingly put himself in a compromising position. For example, the article quotes Locker’s wife: “He was going into the city and coming home. He was supposed to be coming home…He was supposed to come home. He wasn’t there by choice.” See L.I. dad slain uptown, N.Y. Daily News, second column, July 17, 2009. It also quotes Locker’s mother-in-law: “He probably trusted someone…He was a very trusting person. That’s probably how it happened. You could sell him the Brooklyn bridge.” Id. Finally, it quotes a neighbor who “often took bike rides with Locker:” “He was a nice, really great guy…He was a really wonderful father.” Id. at third column.

Was the News mocking these people? Or was it genuinely trying to suggest that Jeffrey Locker was a “great father” who was not in East Harlem “by choice,” but rather because he was a “trusting person?” True, these people knew Locker from his “respectable life” in Valley Stream. They likely had no idea that he had secret sexual desires, or at least refused to acknowledge them. But they are the only people quoted. They did not even quote a neutral police source that might have shed some objective light on the reasons why a suburban white male was alone in a “bad neighborhood” at 3 A.M. on a weeknight.

If the News expects its readers to think that Jeffrey Locker was completely innocent and that some “evil minority person” took advantage of him because he was “too trusting,” then it is both racist and naïve. Jeffrey Locker was in the city because he wanted to patronize some prostitutes in East Harlem. He would not have bought condoms if sex were not his goal. He thought he would park his car, buy some condoms at the local bodega, invite some hookers into the car and do what he came to do. But he was playing a dangerous game. He was in a risky position by choice. “Reasonable people” do not go to “high-crime” areas late at night, let alone park expensive cars there. Apparently someone saw him as a mark and attacked him. We cannot know exactly why it happened, but it is not very surprising. It was a crime of opportunity. And it simply defies belief to suggest that someone “seduced” Jeffrey Locker. Did someone “entice him” on his way home to Long Island, convince him to drive all the way uptown, park his car in a “bad neighborhood,” then kill him? That kind of thing just doesn’t happen. Moreover, the unbiased eyewitness statements contradict that scenario. According to the “neighborhood people” who saw him, Locker was “cool” and “relaxed” as he walked from a Deli carrying condoms. That does not sound like some overly trusting, misled soul to me.

In sum, this was a white suburban man who was unsatisfied with his boring sexual life at home, so he went into the city for some fast, anonymous sex with black and Hispanic prostitutes. This was a man with secrets. He was leading a double life. To his neighbor, he was a “really nice guy” and “a great father” who “rode bikes.” But the “neighborhood people” saw his dark side. Who knows how many times he had gone to East Harlem in the past? All this was clear to me when I read the article. I saw a sexually frustrated white middle-aged suburban man using lower-income city dwellers to play out fantasies that he could not indulge in his “respectable life.” It is not complicated. It may be embarrassing and pathetic, but not complicated.

Yet the article reported none of these things. To fully grasp what happened in Jeffrey Locker’s case, I had to apply my own experience and analysis. I could not rely solely on the information in the report. Still, newspapers claim to present “unbiased fact” so that we learn the “truth” about “what happened” in particular events. Newspapers report on “matters of public concern.” Murders concern the public. Nonetheless, the article about Jeffrey Locker does not remotely report the “truth.” No one will ever know the “truth” except Jeffrey Locker and the person who killed him in his car. A few witnesses saw Locker two hours before he died. Their sensory recollections provide us some insight about his motivations and why he was in East Harlem. But they know nothing about his final moments.

Despite the News' best efforts—and every reporting company like it—we can never really grasp the “truth” about events we do not perceive. At best, we can interpret what “may have happened” based upon our own experience, memory, intuition, impressions and emotions. When we do that, we do not actually perceive “what happened,” nor do we come any closer to the “truth” as an absolute matter. Rather, we create truth in our own minds. We hear recollections. We read details. We digest reports. These things interact with our own experience to create something we believe. We see events in our mind’s eye even if we never saw them with our real eyes. We think these mental images are “truth.” In fact, they are nothing more than interpretations based on our own experience. To that extent, truth is entirely subjective. And because it depends on experience, no two people will ever precisely agree on what is true. After all, we all draw on unique experiences to guide our interpretations.

At best, we can agree on certain “indisputable details” when analyzing events. Nothing can replace actual sense. But our society demands “truth” about events, even when no one was there to observe them. Our news media answers this demand. In so doing, it assumes a central role in our consciousness. If we cannot be present to experience every event that concerns us as a society, at least we can receive some information upon which to make our own conclusions. Still, how many people really draw their own conclusions from news reporting? After all, as the Locker case shows, news reporters have the power to selectively publish certain details about past events. Those details channel interpretation. Not everyone has the same life experience to tease out the subtleties concealed in a story. In fact, news stories lure the reader into feeling that he is reading “the pure truth” about a past event. But this is delusional. The mere fact that a newspaper describes an event does not make it true. Rather, the fact that a newspaper describes an event should make the reader even more suspicious about “what actually happened.”

I do not rely on any news media for “truth.” But I do not completely discount it, either. After all, news outlets perform an essential role in disseminating details about events. Without them, we would have no information at all about “things that happen.” Beyond that, however, it is up to me to sort out what “actually happened” based upon my own life experience. It is not easy; interpretation never is. Yet if we simply credit everything we hear in the news, we lend ourselves to deception far more than “truth.” After all, we humans have very limited sensory range. Our senses provide the best pathway to “truth” about the external world. Unfortunately, we can use them to grasp a comparatively minuscule proportion of all the things that happen during our lifetimes. For everything else, we depend on language, second-hand reports, stories, memories, distortions, recollections, biased impressions and legend. In all these cases, “we weren’t there” to perceive the event reported. Nor can we really say whether it “really happened.” We can choose simply to believe it did—or did not. And even then, we see something in our mind’s eye that might be totally different than what “actually happened.”

Is there any way to sift through language, fragmented details, memory and bias to find “truth?” Is it a hopeless endeavor? Or worse, do we just reveal our own individual biases when we try to “create truth?”

THE LAW IS NOT AS HONEST AS YOU MIGHT THINK : LEGAL FICTIONS AND INTENT

AN ESSAY

I always knew that the law was imperfect. Even before law school, I harbored skepticism for legal process. Intuitively, I knew that human law did not aim for justice; rather, it aimed merely to provide order and to confound its listeners. Yesterday, I used satire to illustrate the law’s capacity to confound. Franz Kafka routinely alluded to the law’s obscurity in his short stories and novels, including The Trial, The Metamorphosis, Before the Law and In The Penal Colony. In fact, “legal characters” in those stories—whether executioners, judges or lawyers—speak an elusive language that their listeners can barely grasp. In the Penal Colony story, an executioner speaks only in French, while the condemned man stands there utterly oblivious to his impending doom.

When Kafka’s characters hear legal discourse, they fall into confusion. They know their lives and fortunes are at stake, yet they cannot figure out what the lawyers are talking about. It is oddly similar to the way Old Testament characters feel when attempting to figure out God’s plans. See, e.g., Job. For both Kafka and the Talmud, there is some knowledge inaccessible to the human mind. In Kafka’s world, the law represents “inaccessible knowledge.” It operates on a higher plane, somewhere beyond human understanding. It is powerful. It holds its subjects in its grasp. Yet it is incomprehensible, just like God’s will.

But the law is not God. It is a human invention. True, it confounds. It is hard to understand; in many cases it is maddeningly counterintuitive. Yet it can be understood. And in my experience, the more I understand the law, the more I see that it proceeds on hypocritical premises. It really has no abstract claim on right or justice, yet it aims to convince people that it does. With its perplexing rules, arcane exceptions and double-speaking rhetoric, the law ensures orderly property transfers and criminal punishment for “undesirable behavior.” These things do not come from God; they are men’s concerns. They affect men’s bodies and possessions. Most legal subject matter is not ethereal or majestic. Quite the contrary, it is yawningly banal.

It is not even completely honest. When I studied law, I marveled when I encountered situations in which the law simply “makes things up” to arrive at particular results. The law professes respect for “truth” and the “way things actually happen.” Yet in both practice and theory, the law sacrifices these things for administrative convenience. Judges call these embarrassing shortcuts “legal fictions.” They allow the law to segue effortlessly between practical reality and an artificial legal overlay. After all, legal results are not the same as actual results. It is one thing to say John killed Bill; that is “practical reality.” But it is something else entirely to say that John murdered Bill. Murder is a legal conclusion. It may or may not reflect “actual reality.” Instead, only a judge or jury—viewing the facts long after they happened—can decide whether to make the conclusion: “This is murder.” Murder does not really exist; rather, it is merely a judgment applied to past actions after the event. And the law manufactures fictions to help these post hoc judgments along, whether or not they conform with “actual reality.”

Intent is essential to many legal judgments. In criminal law, the word “intent” appears in virtually every case. Why? Simple: Because crimes are essentially written recipes. Legislatures concoct “crime recipes” that define behavior that they do not like. They then compile all their “recipes” in a book called the “criminal code” and let the Judiciary determine whether particular human behavior fits the “recipes” they wrote down. For example, the legislature may define the “murder recipe” as follows: “Murder is the intentional killing of one human being by another.” What is the recipe, then? Well, you need several ingredients. First, you need two people: one killer and one victim. The killer has to do something, namely, kill the victim somehow. The victim has to die as a result of the killer’s action. More importantly, at the time the killer kills, he must intend to kill the victim. That is a “mental requirement.”

This all sounds simple. But how does a “factfinder” decide—long after the event—whether a particular person “intended” to kill another? After all, intent is internal. We never know what other people “intend” at particular moments. That is a great mystery in life. Even if a person says what he wants to do, he might actually want something else. Lying aside, intent means a person’s subjective preconception concerning the future results of his conduct. Intent refers to what the individual thinks or expects will happen when he acts a certain way. Intent refers to expected results. In short, it is exquisitely individual; and it is virtually impossible to prove. When someone gets killed, for example, the killer may have expected something quite different than the other person’s death. He might have only intended to run a stoplight, or even just play a joke that went horribly wrong. He may have intended only to hurt the other person. Whatever his “expectation” may have been, it certainly was not to extinguish the victim’s life.

But this does not suit the law. After all, an orderly society cannot tolerate killings, nor can an orderly society cannot allow killers to merely say they “didn’t mean it” to escape the law’s wrath. Still, how does the law get around the philosophical difficulty surrounding intent? If the murder recipe requires intent, it must mean the law must prove the killer actually expected to kill the victim through his action, right?

No. In these circumstances, the law resorts to legal fictions. It does not have to prove actual intent. It must only prove legal intent. Legal intent means “intent sufficient to meet the technical definition of ‘intent’ in the murder recipe.” At common law, English courts called this “legal intent” “malice aforethought.” They could have called it anything, really. They could have called it “malice on Wednesday” and apply it every day. The name is irrelevant. But from a practical standpoint, it allowed the law to prove “intent” without proving what actually existed in the killer’s mind. How did it do this? It merely decided for itself what “malice aforethought” means. The law said it could mean “intentionally killing,” “killing with an ‘abandoned and malignant heart,’” “killing as a result of a felony” or “killing with premeditation.” It did not matter whether the killer actually expected these results to follow. It was solely the court’s decision whether to shoehorn his behavior into one of its pre-made categories.

Philosophically speaking, this is pure fantasy. Consider especially the “killing as a result of a felony” category. Under this fiction, the law declares people “murderers” who cause death by participating in a felony of any kind. This means that a robber becomes a “murderer” if the robbery gives the victim a heart attack. The law says: “The felony resulted in the victim’s death. That means the robber had malice aforethought. A man who causes death with malice aforethought fits the ‘murder’ recipe. Thus, the man is a murderer.” This is so even if the man—as a philosophical matter, did not expect to kill anyone by his conduct. He may even have intended something totally different. The law takes this fiction to absurd lengths. Courts have found men guilty of murder who sat in a getaway car while their accomplices robbed a store in which someone died. According to the law’s logical gymnastics, the getaway driver “participated” in the felony, and that “participation” resulted—however remotely—to the death in the store. His “actual intent” means absolutely nothing in this warped analysis. If it did, the law would never convict anyone. Intent is “too difficult” as a philosophical matter. So it settles for fictions and administrative convenience, smug in its belief that no one can really challenge its authority.

In my view, this is pure dishonesty. It does matter whether someone actually intended to cause harm in a murder prosecution. When the law labels someone a “murderer,” it affixes a crippling moral badge. As a society, we condemn people who make “harmful decisions” calculated to injure others. We condemn them more if they actually want to end another person’s life, then do it. In this traditional sense, “murderers” are people who truly want to kill their victims and carry out their desire with violent action. They deserve condemnation because they had bad intentions and acted upon them. Yet we do not as forcefully condemn criminals who do not actually kill their victims, like the getaway car driver or even the robber who had no intent to kill anyone. When the law foists “intent to kill” on these people—even when they actually intended something completely different—the law commits dishonesty. It is no excuse to say that it is “too difficult” to prove what exists in another man’s mind. It is possible to prove what a man intended using circumstantial evidence, even if he insists he intended something else. Neutral witnesses can say they saw the defendant screaming at the victim and waving a broken beer bottle at him before slashing his throat. That proves intent to kill even if the defendant says otherwise. But proving a man intended only to drive a getaway car from a robbery does not make him a “murderer.” It is facetious to say otherwise.

In short, legal fictions make the law look ridiculous. And when the law is verifiably ridiculous in one area, it loses credibility in others. Nonetheless, many scholars—and many jurists—see no problem with legal fictions. After all, according to these apologists, how else are we supposed to prosecute criminals for antisocial behavior? The apologists argue that society has a right to prosecute harmful and dangerous conduct, even if the defendant did not really intend to hurt anyone. They say: “If we had to actually prove intent, these bad men would walk the streets.” But what good does it do to prosecute people using philosophically false concepts? No one likes antisocial behavior and violence, but it is pure sophistry to argue that a getaway driver “intended” to kill someone in a store when all he really wanted to do was drive a car away from the store. From both a grammatical and logical standpoint, the getaway driver did not “intend” to kill anyone. Yet the law says he did. Is this not madness? Still, very few people question this result, because no one wants to defend a criminal. This is unfortunate, if for no other reason than the law—which should aspire to something higher than mere administrative convenience—shamelessly cuts logical corners for shortsighted results. In my view, this tarnishes the law’s reputation because it shows its willingness to bend the truth for convenience.

Law cannot take the moral high ground if it cuts corners. It cannot simultaneously insist on truth and justice while resorting to absurd logical gymnastics to manufacture convictions. I reject the argument that getaway drivers can be transformed into “murderers” because the “murder definition” is “traditional.” We should not follow bad rules because previous generations were too stupid or too cowardly to revise them. Tradition does not magically transform every practice into a indispensable fixture in our lives. Put simply, traditional “murder definitions” are just silly. Convicting people under these definitions cuts against reality. When the law does this, it darkens its own name. The law should stand for logic, consistency and conscientious adherence to genuine evidence, not perplexing rules that yield counterintuitive results. People want the law to be good. But it cannot really be good if it brands getaway drivers “murderers” as readily as it does serial killers. In a word, when legal fictions obscure practical reality, there is no reason why the public should respect the law. It is just being dishonest with us. And dishonesty does not deserve respect.