Ardeur - 14 Writers on the Anita Blake Vampire Slayer
Page 13
I know Melissa, Mel, and I know her background in the law. I found her area of expertise applied to my series to be interesting, but not surprising. What the United States of America has done to the legal vampire citizens in my world is one of the worst abuses of personal freedom that I could imagine. You are a legal citizen, you pay taxes, but still don’t have the right to vote. Worse, you can be killed by a court order of execution because you’ve been deemed too dangerous to be held for trial.
Now, I mention in the early books some incidents that caused this change. There was a master vampire who escaped a maximum security prison by using mind tricks, and he slaughtered a lot of people getting out. He killed more when he got to the outside. i used the headlines of murderers and rapists who are paroled early and then go on to commit more and often worse crimes. What if these people had superhuman strength, mystical powers, and were almost unstoppable? Would we as a society tolerate the slaughter, or would we fight back with the scariest, and best, weapon we have, the law? I took the worstcase scenario view and gave us legal executioners with the full weight of the law and courts behind them.
Mel points out, rightly, that the judicial branch is almost gutted in this process except that it signs off on warrants of execution. But one thing she fails to add is that Anita and the other executioners don’t just kill vampires. They kill wereanimals, human beings when they’re not furry. It takes more evidence to get a warrant of execution on a wereanimal than a vampire, but in some Western states if you shoot someone dead and later a blood test proves that the human body was a lycanthrope you get off scot-free, because the law assumes that simply by being a wereanimal the person was a real and present threat to your safety, and shooting him or her was a sort of weird self-defense.
The vampires and their lobby are fighting to get representation to go with the taxes they’re paying. But all the preternatural citizens of the United States are in jeopardy from the very forces that protect the rest of us. It is a civil rights nightmare, and that part, at least, I did on purpose. But in researching the law, I lost some illusions. I thought the law was supposed to be about justice, but it is not. The law is about the law, and it can only be interpreted and administered as it is written. a badly written law can tie the hands of a good judge because he, or she, has no room to do what they feel is right, because they are charged with upholding the letter of the law, not always the spirit of it. I am a great deal more cynical about the legal system than I was when I wrote the first Anita book, and a great deal more respectful of the nearly impossible task of writing laws that are fair and protect us all equally.
In the end equality is something the law strives for, but it’s almost impossible to achieve. In my world we’ve given up the pretense of fairness for vampires and shapeshifters. I explored how much Anita’s attitude has changed in Skin Trade, where she realizes the law doesn’t have enough room for some of the things she knows to be true about vampires. Weak ones can be controlled by the powerful and they can be as innocent as any bespelled human, so why should they die as if they’re the big, bad vampire? In Skin Trade Anita actually saves more people than she kills. I think it may be a first.
—Laurell
Trying the System
by Melissa L. Tatum
In Anita Blake’s world, the monster lurking in the dark has emerged from the closet and become the monster who lives next door. College students earn degrees in preternatural biology, cops must determine whether the corpse at their murder scene will come back to bite them (literally!), and EMTs must treat everything from humans to vampires to shifters to all sorts of other formerly mythical creatures. And the criminal justice system struggles with how to handle beings with superhuman strength and abilities. How do you incarcerate a vampire who can bend the bars of the cell and escape? How do you impose pretrial detention on a vampire who can exert mind control powers on his jailer, compelling the jailer to open the cell and forget ever doing so?
Over the first dozen books in the Anita Blake series, the U.S. government wrestles with these issues, and while it laudably decided to make vampires legal citizens of the United States, it unfortunately decides to flagrantly violate approximately one-half of their constitutional rights by imbuing federal marshals with the legal authority to be vampire executioners. No search warrants or arrest warrants for vampires; instead, courts issue warrants of execution, essentially creating a system where the sniper and the cop combine to create an assassin with a badge and give a whole new meaning to the phrase “execute the warrant.”
To fully understand what is happening in Anita’s universe, we must take a brief detour through the somewhat convoluted thicket of the criminal justice system. The American criminal justice system prides itself on being a model of fairness, a system founded on the bedrock principle that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than for one innocent person to be convicted. The system achieves this goal by creating an elaborate set of procedural protections, and the most important of those procedures are articulated in the U.S. Constitution. Twenty-five clauses in the first ten constitutional amendments address individual rights and create boundaries to prevent the government from overreaching. Over half of these clauses, fourteen of the twenty-five to be exact, deal with the criminal justice system.
These principles govern everything from police investigations and interrogations and arrests to the trial and sentencing process. They also provide endless fodder for books, movies, and television shows. Americans are addicted to legal thrillers in every form, from John Grisham’s The Firm to the Law & Order franchise to Legally Blonde. The legal process also provides a microcosm for books and movies and television shows to explore how society interacts with those who challenge its norms—think To Kill a Mockingbird, Minority Report, or X-Men.
In addition, these principles provide endless fodder for politicians and the media who seek to manipulate public reaction. Every time the specter of Willie Horton is dragged into the spotlight, every time some media pundit pontificates about the killer who went free on a legal technicality, the public condemns the legal system for placing the rights of murderers above the rights of their victims. What the politicians and the media gloss over is that these principles are not legal technicalities; rather, they are rights. When our Founding Fathers wrote the U.S. Constitution, their purpose was to design a system that protected each person’s liberty by ensuring that the government must justify any decision to deprive a citizen of that most cherished right—freedom. The Declaration of Independence speaks of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the inalienable rights of all men; the Constitution proclaims that it intends “to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
At the same time, the Founding Fathers understood that it is part of human nature for the group to join together against those individuals who do not conform to group norms. Humans naturally clump together in everything from high school cliques to the Kiwanis club. And they have words, often negative, to describe those who don’t—nonconformist, loner, someone who marches to the beat of a different drum. In recognition of these tendencies, the Founding Fathers created a criminal justice system that is a study in contrasts, a balance between group and individual rights.
On the one hand, the entire purpose of the system is to protect society as a collective from the aberrant behavior of certain individuals: a criminal case is always the State v. or the People v. the individual defendant. Every society establishes behavioral norms—rules that define what conduct is acceptable and what is not. Not all “unacceptable” behavior is criminal; rather, each society must define for itself what behavior it will treat as “criminal,” as so unacceptable that individuals who violate those norms must be singled out for punitive sanctions. It’s the difference between littering and wearing white shoes after Labor Day; they are both aesthetically displeasing, but only one is a crime.
On the other hand, the whole purpose of the criminal trial is to protect the individual from society. Society c
an protect itself from aberrant behavior by imposing criminal sanctions on individuals, but only if it follows the proper procedures. The United States is a system of checks and balances—three branches of government balancing each other and ensuring the Constitution is obeyed. In the criminal justice system, the executive branch, through the police and the prosecutor’s office, investigates crime and instigates the process of seeking criminal sanctions. Indeed, this division of labor is at the heart of the successful Law & Order television show, now in its record twentieth season. Roughly the first half of each episode follows the police investigation, while the second half focuses on the prosecution.
The police and prosecutors, however, are just two aspects of the system. Presiding over both of them is the judicial branch, which, through the trial and appellate process, ensures that the police and prosecutors do not overstep their boundaries. Much of the dramatic tension in the second half of Law & Order arises from the rulings of the judges. Will the confession be suppressed? Will the plea bargain be accepted? Will the surprise witness be allowed? In answering these questions, the judicial branch refers to and relies upon the Constitution, thereby administering a fair process that protects the individual rights of defendants.
In Anita Blake’s world, the process has become skewed, at least with respect to vampires. The role of the judicial branch is minimal; it exists only to review and issue warrants of execution. Issuing a warrant is usually the beginning of the court’s involvement in a criminal case, not the beginning and the end. With no trial and no jury, the role of the judicial branch is all but eliminated, leaving the mission of protecting the public from criminal vampires squarely and heavily on the shoulders of the executive branch. Indeed, in Incubus Dreams, one cop challenges Anita’s actions, asking, “[W]ho made you judge, jury, and [executioner]?” To which Anita replies, “The federal and state government.”
The decision to essentially eliminate the role of the judicial branch is deeply troubling, because in the American system, “guilty” and “deserving of punishment” are not necessarily the same thing. A defendant may have “done the deed” but offers an acceptable excuse, such as self-defense. While we don’t condone killing another human being, we also don’t believe you have to sacrifice yourself—it is okay to defend yourself, even if the result is that you kill your attacker. Sorting out these types of claims is part of the judicial branch’s job.
The American system also believes in tempering justice with mercy tailored to each defendant’s personal circumstances. We may not accept a proffered excuse—like acting in the “heat of passion” or “temporary insanity”—as a reason to acquit, but it may be used to mitigate the punishment. While we don’t want to encourage people to kill adulterous spouses, we do understand that unexpectedly finding your husband in bed with your sister can cause a person to lose control in a manner that is not likely to happen again—especially if said husband is now six feet under.
These defenses are some of the ways the judicial branch keeps a careful watch on the rights of the defendant and reins in potentially overzealous prosecutors. Our society has decided that why a person commits a crime is relevant to whether and how they will be punished. But these defenses are not available to vampires accused of crimes in Anita Blake’s world. The criminal justice system for vampires consists of a stake through the heart and maybe a separation of head from shoulders. (As Anita puts it in Incubus Dreams, “dead is at least half their brains spilled, and daylight through their chests.”) The why behind their actions is irrelevant.
Examining motivation is only one purpose of the criminal trial. Another purpose, perhaps the primary one, is to put the prosecution’s evidence to the test—to put witnesses under oath when they provide testimony and to allow the defense to cross-examine witnesses and present its own evidence. Anita recognizes and wrestles with her conscience on this issue in Incubus Dreams; to get a death warrant, “All we needed was proof, or, depending on the judge, strong suspicion. Once I’d been okay with that. Now, it bothered me.” In fact, in Incubus Dreams Anita actually takes the time to investigate whether the warrant was issued for the correct vampire and, upon discovering it was not, locates and executes the guilty one instead.
In another scene from the same book, Anita explains to the reader why the law was changed to require more than one count of using vampire wiles to have sex before a death warrant could be issued: “Those of us in the middle just didn’t like the idea of a death warrant being issued on the say-so of one date who woke up the next morning with a bad case of buyer’s remorse.” If warrants are being issued for the wrong vampire and other warrants rest solely on one person’s say-so, particularly a person with a motive to lie, the process is certainly flawed.
In short, most of the normal procedural protections have been tossed out the window for vampires. The process is clearly skewed.
However, a skewed process is not necessarily also an unconstitutional process. Because vampires are citizens in Anita Blake’s world, they are entitled to the same due process and equal protection as all other citizens. For a country founded on the rights of the individual, the United States’ history is full of instances where people were categorized by and punished for what they looked like, where they were from, or who they worshipped. We enslaved African Americans, confined American Indians to reservations, incarcerated Japanese Americans, discriminated against Mexicans, and demonized Muslims. In recognition of this basic human impulse, the Founding Fathers inscribed restrictions in the Constitution designed to limit the government’s ability to make and enforce laws based on group identity. The government is allowed to make such laws—after all, the September 11 hijackers were all Middle Eastern—but those laws will be strictly scrutinized by the courts, who will require that the government present a compelling case to justify the legal discrimination.
Thus, “due process” and “equal protection” do not mean that everyone must be treated the same. At their most fundamental level, they mean the defendant must receive a fair hearing and any differences in treatment must be justified. What constitutes a fair trial for the average defendant would not be a fair trial for a defendant who possesses superhuman strength and the psychic ability to influence witnesses and jurors. What, then, constitutes a fair trial for a vampire? How do we deal with the “different,” the “strange,” and the “uncontrollable”?
Although the rights enunciated in the Constitution can be a bit amorphous, they still serve as the touchstone or starting point for answering those questions. In Anita Blake’s world, vampires are the “other,” the group that challenges the majority’s view of itself. They are different and therefore feared and sometimes hated; vampires are almost literally the embodiment of the boogeyman, our childhood fear come to life.
And as with all minority groups, while one segment of the general populace argues for greater understanding, another segment argues that society must enact a slew of laws to protect itself. We saw this in the aftermath of September 11 with the PATRIOT Act and with the cyclical tightening and loosening of immigration and border control laws. Above all, the U.S. Constitution and its individual rights protections exist to control and moderate these impulses. So did Anita’s federal government violate the Constitution in authorizing warrants of execution and deputizing vampire executioners? Or do the differences between humans and vampires justify such radically different procedures for handling vampires accused of crimes?
As Felix Cohen, a specialist in American Indian law, declared:
Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shifts from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith.
Substitute “vampire” for “Indian,” and you encapsulate the issue. Granting legal citizenship to vampires means the rules apply to vampires the same as to all Americans. It also means that the same restrictions apply to the government; the government may not violate t
he rights of vampires any more than it may violate the rights of any citizen. To do otherwise, to create a second and distinct set of rules for vampires, demonstrates a lack of faith in the system and a lack of trust in the system’s ability to handle minority groups.
While many people would likely argue that vampires are not “disadvantaged” in the traditional sense (in addition to being powerful and immortal, all but the youngest vampires inhabiting Anita’s universe possess some ability that might allow them to thwart or skew the criminal justice process), there is no doubt that vampires are a “disfavored” group. One has only to look at Dolph’s reactions to his human son’s romantic relationship with a vampire to recognize that prejudice is alive and well in Anita’s world. Dolph’s hatred is extreme, but his feelings are mirrored in varying degrees by other characters in the series—including, at least in the earlier books, Anita herself.
Anita Blake’s world is reeling from vampires being made legal citizens in the U.S. and is struggling to come to grips with what that means. It is precisely in such times of crisis that the Constitution’s protections are the most valuable and the most necessary. It is precisely in such situations that the Constitution’s protections ensure that our system remains fair and even-handed and does not become twisted by public fear and hysteria. We can’t sacrifice the Constitution for expediency. Only if there are no other ways of containing rogue vampires can we justify summary execution.
The critical question is whether the superhuman abilities possessed by vampires justify the government’s decision to eliminate the trial process for vampires. While it is true that Anita Blake’s world still requires individualized warrants of execution for vampires, so some proof of wrongdoing must be presented, the government has sacrificed the defendant’s other rights on the altar of protecting society. Vampire defendants have no ability to respond to the charges, to present witnesses in their own defense, to question the government’s witnesses, or to have a jury decide their guilt or innocence.