Tag Archives: law

Justice: by truth or victory?

Credit: Javitomad

Which sort of judicial system, generally speaking, is more likely to lead to justice? One that:

  • looks for the truth, or
  • lets two sides fight it out to see who wins?

You might think that I’m setting up another facile thought experiment, but I am not. Most of the world has, through the fascinating and mysterious quirks of history, chosen one or the other of these underlying approaches to justice.

The first philosophy — justice as a search for truth — we call the inquisitorial system (because a judge sets out to inquire after the facts of a case, ie the truth).

The second philosophy — justice by duking it out until one side is left standing — we call the adversarial system (because two adversaries and their lawyers meet in court, and a judge merely makes sure that the rules are observed).

We generally find the inquisitorial philosophy undergirding the civil law systems of continental Europe and its former colonies and the countries that have adopted it voluntarily. That turns out to be most of the world — all the countries in blue on the map above.

And we find the adversarial philosophy mainly in the common law systems of England and all the lands it ruled at one point or another — ie, the countries in red or brown on the map. (Let’s leave the countries with Islamic Law, in yellow, and Mongolia, in green, out of this post.)

Because justice, and therefore law, is so fundamental to freedom (which is one of my favorite topics) I have for some time been pondering the question I opened with. So I challenged Richard, a frequent commenter on The Hannibal Blog and a veteran English lawyer, to compare the two systems. Somewhat to my surprise, he did.

In this rigorous series of posts, Richard introduces the systems in turn, proceeding methodically and cautiously to unveil — somewhat coquettishly, I might add 😉 — his preference. (I won’t spoil the fun: Go and find out for yourself.)

Here now is my modest contribution.

A brief history of the systems

Historically, the adversarial system descends from the brute medieval practice of trial by combat.

You did me wrong! → Let’s fight.

It is, in short, the law of the stronger.

Click for credits

Right from the start, especially whenever ladies were involved, the adversaries were allowed to appoint champions to fight on their behalf.

Like its gruesome medieval judicial cousin, trial by ordeal, trial by combat made no pretense to truth. Somebody prevailed, that was all. So it was efficient. But we would not call that justice.

In 1215, Pope Innocent III wanted to change that. So he reformed the court system administered by the Catholic Church across Europe (ie, the ecclesiastical courts, from Greek ekklesia, assembly or church).

The idea was that an ecclesiastical court could take the initiative and summon and interrogate witnesses even without an accusation by one adversary against another.

Trial by combat was now forbidden in the ecclesiastical system. On the continent, this ecclesiastical tradition then became the basis for the subsequent evolution of secular courts.

But in England, Henry II had, during the 1160s, established parallel secular courts. When the church-administered courts in England switched to the inquisitorial system, the secular courts remained adversarial, and those in time became the courts of England. Hence the split.

Henry II

Critique

I) The adversarial system

The adversarial system makes me — intrinsically, philosophically, emotionally — uncomfortable because it was not originally designed to ascertain truth, merely the supremacy of one side.

That said, it has evolved in such as way that truth is now the implicit and desired by-product of the adversarial struggle. If the rules (of evidence, testimony, presumption of innocence et cetera) are sophisticated, it is hoped, the truth is revealed in the process and the “right” side wins, so that the outcome is indeed just.

Nonetheless, there are troubling remnants of the system’s combat origins:

1) The undue role of the “champions”

Today, we call those champions lawyers (attorneys, solicitors….). In the adversarial system, they are the stars. What do you tell a friend in trouble in an adversarial country? “Get a good lawyer.”

Some people try to get a good lawyer, but end up with a bad one, or at least one less good than the adversary’s. Other people cannot afford a good one. Others can afford entire armies of lawyers, and usually win. So money plays an unsavory role.

If the truth really wanted to be revealed, why should it matter so much which lawyer you have? But we all know that it does matter.

2) The undue emphasis on winning

An inquisitor wants to find the truth. But a prosecutor wants to win. To him, that means to convict.

A couple of days ago, I was chatting with Steve Cooley, the district attorney of Los Angeles County and a candidate for attorney general of California. How does he compare himself to his rival, Kamala Harris, the district attorney of San Francisco? Through the conviction rate, of course. Whether or not the convictions were just does not even come up for discussion. (How would you even discuss it?)

In practice, said Cooley, about 95% of convictions come through plea bargains, an inherent part of the adversarial system. (Ie, the two sides come to an agreement even before an independent judge or jury evaluates the truth of their arguments.)

Well, I recently mentioned Harvey Silverglate’s book detailing the various excesses to which prosecutors can go in the pursuit of victory. You can make anybody break down by piling more charges on him until he pleads. That does not make it just.

II) The inquisitorial system

The inquisitorial system makes me uncomfortable in a different way.

In theory, it is splendid to task somebody with inquiring after the truth. Take the example of plea bargains cited above: In the inquisitorial system, a guilty plea does not automatically lead to conviction. It is merely one more piece of evidence. (The inquisitor might decide to ignore the plea if he suspects, for instance, that the pleader is trying to protect somebody else, or is insane, et cetera.)

In practice, however, you have to choose an actual human being to find out the truth, and how is that likely to go?

There is a reason why we (or at least I) hear bad connotations in the word inquisition. It reminds us of the Spanish Inquisition, a time when the system went awfully wrong. The inquisitors, as it happened, were altogether more concerned with pleasing Ferdinand and Isabella than with ascertaining the truth. And they subscribed to the notion that you can get any truth that suits you; it’s just a matter of how you ask.

So an inquisition into truth can become corrupt. Notice, however, that this is a problem common to both the inquisitorial and the adversarial systems: The judiciary must be absolutely independent from political pressure. That includes not only the executive branch of government but also the mob. Ask black people in the Jim Crow South how well the adversarial system worked for them.

The subtler but more profound critique of the inquisitorial system has to do with what Richard calls “over-confidence in the expert”:

If you have a trained magistracy, ostensibly expert in discerning and charged with discovering the truth, there is the risk of over-valuing their work.

And why would that be a problem? Because experts are experts precisely because they have seen lots and lots of cases. And so they are likely to slip into a thought process that says “Hmm, this case X reminds of Y, and I should be consistent so I will…”. No. The facts (truth) of case X must be considered on its own merits alone.

Perhaps experts are less able to do that. As Richard says,

Justice is the art of espying the exception.

Which leaves us, unfortunately, where we started: with questions.

Who, expert or lay, is more likely to espy the exception?  Who is most likely to be free and fair? Which process — a search for truth or a struggle that reveals it — is more just?

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American Caligulas

Alan Dershowitz

It is fundamental to a free society that its citizens be able to read the law and conform their conduct to it.

So says Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and famous lawyer, in his foreword to “Three Felonies a Day,” a new book by Harvey Silverglate. (Silverglate talks about his book at the Cato Institute in the clip below).

So this is yet another way in which simplicity, one of my recurring themes on The Hannibal Blog, is a prerequisite for freedom, another thread of mine. By contrast, complexity and vagueness, by entrapping citizens, can lead them into serfdom.

America’s founders, Dershowitz reminds us, used to say that a criminal statute had to be so clear and simple that it could be understood when read by a person “while running.” They believed that, if people struggle to understand what they are supposed to do or refrain from doing, society is no longer free in any meaningful sense of that term.

Caligula

The notorious Roman emperor Caligula also understood this, but had a different motivation. Cassius Dio (LIX, 28.8), tell us that

after enacting severe laws in regard to the taxes, he inscribed them in exceedingly small letters on a tablet which he then hung up in a high place, so that it should be read by as few as possible and that many through ignorance of what was bidden or forbidden should lay themselves liable to the penalties provided…

Another man who understood and used this insight is Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s head of the KGB, who famously said

Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.

The Road to American Serfdom

Is America today like Caligula’s Rome or Beria’s Soviet Union? No, at least not yet, and nobody is suggesting that it is.

But the fact that we need to spell this out should itself cause alarm. For this might be the road we’re on. (We already found that the Soviet Union during the Gulag was the only society with a higher incarceration rate than America today. This is not the sort of peer group that one wants to be compared to!)

The reason for worry is the increasing and extreme vagueness of America’s federal and state statutes. Sometimes, in addition to being vague, statutes also contradict other statutes, so that a law-abiding citizen in certain situations has no legal option to act at all! As Dershowitz writes:

The very possibility that citizens who believe they are law-abiding may, in the eyes of federal prosecutors, be committing three federal felonies each day … threatens the very foundation of our democracy…. when the executive branch, through its politically appointed prosecutors, has the power to criminalize ordinary conduct through accordion-like criminal statutes, the system of checks and balances breaks down…. [We are] … in danger of becoming a society in which prosecutors alone become judges, juries and executioners because the threat of high sentences makes it too costly for even innocent people to resist the prosecutorial pressure.

What he is referring to there is the trend among even innocent defendants today to plead guilty to “reduced” charges rather than risk a trial with draconian sentences in the event of conviction. Because that’s what American prosecutors are wont to do: to pile charges upon charges until the victim breaks down in fear, and tells prosecutors whatever they want to hear in return for a deal, so that the prosecutors can then go after another and more valuable target.

Silverglate, in his book, describes case after case of this so-called “laddering” by prosecutors. (Silverglate’s task is difficult because, by definition, the evidence is not so much in trial records but in the plea bargains that did not lead to trials.)

So let’s talk …

About American prosecutors

Unlike Beria or Caligula, they may genuinely believe that they are on the side of good rather than evil. (Technically, the congressmen who write the laws are the equivalents of Caligula; the prosecutors who manipulate the laws’ vagueness are the Berias.) As Dershowitz writes,

The men and women of zeal who use elastic criminal statutes to prosecute citizens who they believe are exploiting or endangering other citizens may in fact be doing God’s work, but they are not doing Jefferson’s work or Hamilton’s work or Madison‘s work or the work of the other founders of our secular nation and Constitution. They should leave to God (or public opinion) the punishment of immoral people who do not violate the explicit terms of criminal statutes.

America, of course, is unusual among liberal democracies in several respects:

  1. Its attorneys general are political appointments by the president. They have two distinct functions. One is to be loyal and trusted advisers to the president. The other, in theory, is to be impartial prosecutors. Other democracies split these two roles into two separate jobs. America does not.
  2. Being a prosecutor in America is very often merely a stepping stone toward higher office, such as senator or congressman or governor, so prosecutors must … win, win, win. (Remember Spitzer?) Never mind the “truth” or “justice”.
  3. At the state and county level, Americans often elect prosecutors and even judges. This is because they believe that democracy is always synonymous with freedom and refuse to examine this idea. In other democracies, prosecutors and judges are civil servants. In America, many of them campaign for re-election, raise money from voters, compete with each other to be “tough on crime” and so on.

As Dershowitz writes,

Our penchant for voting on everything has reached laughable proportions in Florida, where even “public defenders” must run for office. I can only imaging what the campaign must be like.

The result, of course, is a severe and growing threat to liberty. This is a non-partisan issue, neither of “the left” nor of “the right.” Americans (whether on FOX or MSNBC) must stop evoking “freedom” as a soundbite and political cudgel and start thinking about what it actually means and requires.

Watch Silverglate:


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A tale of two cases: Dumas vs Sipple

Alexandre Dumas pere

I promised in the previous post to follow with two examples of the fascinating differences in American and European law (not to mention culture) when it comes to privacy and its component values, such as liberty, dignity, and honor.

Of the many cases in James Q Whitman’s excellent research into those two traditions, these two caught my attention:

  1. The 1867 case of Alexandre Dumas pere, which expresses perfectly the French (and thus continental European) philosophy on the matter of privacy, and
  2. the case of Oliver Sipple, a gay man who saved President Gerald Ford’s life in an assassination attempt in 1976, which expresses the American philosophy

1) Dumas

Alexandre Dumas père was the author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers and other books. In his sixties, he had a steamy affair (as one did) with an actress and horsewoman from Texas who was almost half his age and (in)famous for mounting stages scantily clad by the standards of the time.

Dumas and his lover posed for several risqué photos. Nobody on Facebook today would bat an eyelid, but the babe was in her underwear, and even the old man was in states of relative undress. Dumas sold the rights to those photos to the photographer, as he later admitted in court. The photographer then published some of these photos.

Dumas, probably thinking of his musketeers who would have demanded a duel on the spot, sued. And — this is the interesting bit — the French courts sided with him.

In its decision, the court cited Dumas’ “right to privacy” which superseded the photographer’s property rights, even though Dumas had explicitly sold him those rights. Dumas, Whitman quotes the court as opining, had

forgotten to take care for his dignity, and [publication of the photos sufficed to] remind him that private life must be walled off in the interest of individuals, and often in the interest of good morals as well.

So there we have it: The French legal culture, following its ancient traditions, saw:

  • the honor of a high-status individual as the highest value at stake,
  • the “media” as the primary threat,
  • and commercial transactions in the marketplace as a vulgar aspect of liberty inferior to the dignity of the people involved.

2) Sipple

In 1975, President Gerald Ford came out of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. A crowd had formed, and a woman, for whatever reasons, raised a gun to shoot the president. Oliver Sipple, a US Marine and Vietnam veteran, saw this and tackled the woman, so that the shot missed the president.

So he became a “hero“.

America’s press declared him so, and followed up with its usual fare, digging up every morsel of Sipple’s private life for the public. This was unfortunate, because Sipple was gay and, although he was living out of the closet in San Francisco, his family in the Midwest had no idea. Sipple wanted his homosexuality kept out of the papers and sued.

By now it should be clear how a continental European court would have ruled. But the American court gave priority to freedom of the press and of speech. Sipple eventually committed suicide.

So (referring back to the previous post) there again we have it: The American legal culture, following its ancient traditions, regarded:

  • liberty, defined as freedom from state tyranny as opposed to public humiliation, as the highest value,
  • an individual’s home as the only locus legitimately walled off from the public, and
  • public spaces and activities (such as San Francisco’s gay scene, or even the venue of an assassination attempt) as fair game.
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Privacy law: US “liberty” vs European “dignity”

These naked Germans are enjoying themselves in the middle of Berlin. I’ve been just as gleefully naked in Munich, Berlin and various other European places. To Germans and other continental Europeans this is a) fun and b) part of freedom. The word for public nudity, in fact, is Freikörperkultur (‘free body culture’), often abbreviated to FKK.

To Americans, of course, this tends to be awkward if not shocking:

“Don’t these Europeans have a sense of privacy?”

Then there is, for example, Monica Lewinsky and that whole thing with the president of the United States. A special prosecutor — nay, all of America — parsed every word of the country’s head of state, demanding to know exactly what these two had been up to in which closet — from “distinguishing characteristics” to stains on dresses and all the rest.

To Americans this was part of freedom — the free press and the right to hold government accountable.

To continental Europeans, by contrast, this was amusing at first, then awkward, then distasteful and finally undignified:

“Don’t these Americans have a sense of privacy?”

The Two Western Cultures of Privacy

So there you have it: two western cultures of privacy, each (being “Western”) deceptively familiar and yet incomprehensible to the other. Here are some questions, which fit perfectly into two of my threads here on The Hannibal Blog: the thread on America and the one on freedom.

  • What is privacy? What is to be kept private from whom, when, where and why?
  • And how does that interrelate with freedom and dignity?

James Q. Whitman

James Q. Whitman, a professor of comparative law at Yale, has written a profound article about exactly this. It is called “The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity Versus Liberty.” I recommend it. Here is the PDF.

For the rest of this post, I’ll try to describe the Atlantic culture clash and then the possible historical causes as Whitman sees them. In the next post, I’ll talk about two cases that are great examples of the two cultures. But first — and before you jump into the comments with your counterexamples (there are many) — note that Whitman himself admits that this is a matter of nuance:

The issue is not whether there is an absolute difference. Comparative law is the study of relative differences.

I. The clash

The conventional wisdom — with which I mostly but not totally agree — is that continental Europe has much stronger privacy laws than America does. In a long list of areas, Europe circumscribes what information can be circulated about people, whereas America hardly does so at all:

  • consumer data
  • credit reporting
  • workplace privacy
  • “discovery” in civil litigation (ie, rummaging around in the records of your opponents in a lawsuit)
  • the dissemination of nude images on the Internet
  • and so on.

As Whitman says,

I have seen Europeans grow visibly angry, for example, when they learn about routine American practices like credit reporting. How, they ask, can merchants be permitted access to the entire credit history of customers who have never defaulted on their debts? Is it not obvious that this is a violation of privacy and personhood, which must be prohibited by law?

By contrast, privacy is explicitly enshrined in European law (both national and EU law). For example, Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects “the right to respect for private and family life,” and the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights features articles on “Respect for Private and Family Life” and “Protection of Personal Data.”

But Americans can counter with a different list to prove that it is actually Europe which allows the compromising of privacy:

  • those “private parts”! (= nudity)
  • baby names: Several EU governments restrict what parents can name their children!
  • Official ID cards/registration: In Germany, for instance, you have to register with the local police when you move to a new place.
  • Court-room use of evidence that Americans would consider illegally seized
  • phone tapping, which apparently happens much more often in Europe than in the US

So the question is: What’s going on here? How did these differences come about? As Whitman puts it,

Why is it that French people won’t talk about their salaries, but will take off their bikini tops? Why is it that Americans comply with court discovery orders that open essentially all of their documents for inspection, but refuse to carry identity cards? Why is it that Europeans tolerate state meddling in their choice of baby names? Why is it that Americans submit to extensive credit reporting without rebelling?

II. Causes: Liberty versus Dignity

Let’s first try to analyze the two cultures of privacy in terms of what each thinks must be kept private from whom and for what purpose.

a) Europe (= dignity)

European privacy laws aim to protect a person’s dignity. In practice, this means protecting the individual’s control over the use of his

  • image,
  • name,
  • reputation, or
  • information

So dignity is implicitly defined as control over one’s public image. You have a right not to be humiliated or embarrassed in public.

And who is the enemy/threat? Who would typically do the humiliating? Well, the press, or its new-media descendants today. Let’s just call them all the paparazzi.

b) America (= liberty)

American privacy laws, by contrast, aim to protect a person’s liberty. The word liberty is here defined in the traditional American (and quite narrow) sense of freedom from government tyranny. (Freedom can have many, many meanings: see here, here and here. ;))

Who is the enemy/threat in this culture?

Well, certainly not the press, whose freedom of speech is one of the things most in need of protection, even when that means that individuals (Lewinsky, Clinton) are being humiliated in public.

Instead, the enemy/threat is the state.

The locus of maximum protection, moreover, is not the public sphere (as in Europe) but the private sanctum of an individual’s home. The government must, to the greatest extent possible, be kept out of it. The police must (in most cases) not break in and search it. (This is true in Europe, too, of course, but the relative emphasis is stronger in America.)

In this culture, the right to privacy decreases as an individual moves further (physically or metaphorically) from his home. Once you’re in the workplace, in the subway, on the street, at the beach or otherwise in public, you’ve “asked for it.” Clinton, Lewinsky: you’re fair game!

Whitman puts the mutual incomprehension this way:

When Americans seem to continental Europeans to violate norms of privacy, it is because they seem to display an embarrassing lack of concern for public dignity—whether the issue is the public indignity inflicted upon Monica Lewinsky by the media, or the self-inflicted indignity of an American who boasts about his salary.

Conversely, when continental Europeans seem to Americans to violate norms of privacy, it is because they seem to show a supine lack of resistance to invasions of the realm of private sovereignty whose main citadel is the home—whether the issue is wiretapping or baby names.

Examples

Let’s take another look at the example of public nudity:

Europeans assume that you have a right to both nudity and dignity in public. So, for instance, the paparazzi (or neighbors) do not have a right to take a picture of you and then put it on the internet, because you must remain in control of your public image. It’s not even OK for others to stare at you. (I’ve gotten in trouble over that.)

This concept of private public nudity is entirely alien to American law. In fact, it sounds oxymoronic (perhaps even just moronic) to Americans. They assume that once you have left the sanctum of your home and entered a public space, and indeed metaphorically shed the “walls” of your mobile “home” in the form of clothes, you can no longer expect privacy. You have, as it were, asked for it.

Just one illustration: The US Supreme Court’s 1995 decision in Vernonia School District v. Acton.

The question before the court was whether high school athletes could be subjected to mandatory drug testing. Yes, they could, said the court, because — and this is the logic that confounds Europeans to the point of making them guffaw — athletes regularly shower together (naked, we assume), and by voluntarily exposing themselves, these athletes can therefore expect less privacy, which means it is OK to test their piss.

(This might also shed light on the debate we had when I proposed “shaming” people who text and drive by snapping pictures of them and publishing them on the web. It seems that we are “free” to implement my idea in America, but not in Europe, where this might compromise the dignity of the drivers.)

III. History

So where do these fascinating differences come from? The conventional answer is that Europe after the Fascist horror of the 1930s and 40s, and in particular Germany after the Nazis, corrected for the sheer indignity of those crimes against humanity by elevating human dignity to the highest value.

I happen to believe this is largely correct (Whitman does not, and in my opinion this part of his thesis is the weakest). For example, Germany’s constitution, written in 1949, explicitly starts with the phrase

Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar (The dignity of each human being is untouchable)

I pointed to this in my post on the different views of healthcare in America and Europe, and alluded to it in my post on the different attitudes toward prisoners. (European law protects the rights of prison inmates “to a degree almost unimaginable for Americans,” as Whitman puts it. The European in me is shocked by the prison conditions in America.)

But Whitman traces the origins of the differences between America and Europe several centuries further back, and this is the most fascinating part of his argument. So here, in brief, are the histories of privacy law in Europe (France and Germany) and America:

1) Europe

In Europe, the concept of dignity “descends” from that of honor and the so-called law of “insult” that accumulated over the centuries around it.

In a nutshell, what we are talking about here are a bunch of toffs dueling, as in the picture above. It was aristocrats and other high-status individuals who protected their honor (ie, their “public image”), both from the prying eyes of the press and from insult by others. Gradually, society lost its taste for cleaning up the gore after duels and encouraged the toffs to meet in court instead.

What Europe’s various revolutions, starting with the French one in 1789, did over time was to elevate more and more low-class individuals to the same “royal treatment.” Eventually, after World War II, all Europeans became entitled to it, just as all adult French and Germans, of whatever status, could now expect to be addressed by other adults as vous or Sie.

France

France and Germany, took subtly different paths to get to the same place: In France, the main body of law was written during the 19th century in response to famous artists and writers doing sexy things of a questionable nature. (I know this comes as a shock.) I’ll highlight one such case, involving the author of The Three Musketeers, in the next post. In most cases, whenever the dignity of a prominent individual was threatened after sexy photos of him or her were published, even when that individual had expressly sold the right to those photos (!), the courts opted to preserve dignity.

Germany

In Germany, also during the 19th century, the individuals whose cases drove the law forward were not so much lascivious artists but brooding philosophers. (Again, I know this comes as a shock.)

Influenced by Hegel, Kant and their ilk, the German lawyers wanted to prove the pre-eminence of free will. They went all the way back to ancient Rome and the law of my hero Scipio to re-interpret the Roman law of “insult” (injuria). From this, they constructed the concept of Persönlichkeit (personality or personhood), which is often used in the same contexts that Americans use liberty but with a twist.

In a nustshell: To be free meant, as Whitman puts it,

to exercise free will, and the defining characteristic of creatures with free will was that they were unpredictably individual, creatures whom no science of mechanics or biology could ever capture in their full richness…  The purpose of “freedom” was to allow each individual fully to realize his potential as an individual: to give full expression to his peculiar capacities and powers.

(Sounds a lot like Abe Maslow’s self-actualization, don’t you think?)

In any case, both the French and the German legal traditions put much less emphasis on the sordid American obsessions with consumer sovereignty and commercial freedom (credit reporting, for example) and much more emphasis on creativity and the presentation of self, of Persönlichkeit in all its eccentric splendor.

2) America

America, by contrast, embarked on the journey of privacy law with the Bill of Rights. And it focused on limiting state power. The Fourth Amendment specifically establishes the right against unlawful searches and seizures as the main expression of privacy.

Searching and seizing is usually done in one’s home, so right from the start, the concept of privacy resided there.

Of course, there have been American lawyers over the years who have tried to make American law more “European”. The main attempt was “The Right to Privacy” by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in 1890. But these attempts never went far.

Property rights and/or freedom of speech almost always prevail in American courts over appeals to privacy and dignity. Whitman cites, for example, the Supreme Court’s decision in Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn and Florida Star v. B.J.F. In these cases, the media published the names of rape victims. In both cases the Supreme Court found that the First Amendment protected media outlets against suit. European courts would have been concerned with protecting the rape victims. Ironically, because those victims might once have been aristocratic toffs.

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