Every day we mistake revenge for justice

There’s one clear lesson to learn from the Umar Zameer case, April 27

Edward Keenan raises a fundamental yet rarely discussed issue in the tragic case of Umar Zameer and Const. Jeffrey Northrup: the hunger for revenge. As Keenan observes, revenge is not justice, neither in this case nor in its broader application.

Ultimately, Zameer got his justice: acquittal on the preposterous allegation that he’d murdered a plain clothes officer. But in the three years between the charge and the jury’s decision, the justice system got its revenge, albeit not the life sentence it sought. It marked Zameer

as a callous cop-killer, causing him to lose his job and home, and compounding his personal despair over a terrible accident that took a man’s life.

This is not to minimize the awful impact on Const. Northrup’s wife and children. In different ways, heartbreak and loss continue to ravage both families. But from the start, the police and prosecution wanted revenge for the death of a police officer, desperately cloaking their cause in nobility, claiming only to seek justice. Their house of cards — and their motivation — quickly collapsed in court.

By nature, our justice system is adversarial, of course. We also live in an increasingly adversarial, intemperate world, where partisan forces routinely weaponize words and unleash waves of destruction and death, all in the name of justice. But as Keenan writes, revenge “should never be mistaken for justice.” Every day, however, we make that mistake, in our homes, on our streets, in our courts and in war zones around the world. Ultimately, we all lose.