Tag Archives: Terrorism

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Making The War-Criminal Case

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Newsweek

In the early hours of April 2, little more than a week after the start of NATO’s bombing campaign, a 14-year-old Kosovar girl named Dalina Caka huddled in the basement of a house in Djakovica’s Qerim district. With her were 18 other women and children, and one man. Outside, Serb police were on a killing-and-burning raid. When the rampaging troops discovered Dalina and the others, they “shot the 20 occupants and then set the house on fire,” killing everyone, according to the war-crimes indictment of Slobodan Milosevic and four of his top henchmen. The indictment lists hundreds of atrocities like these alleged murders in Qerim. Now the challenge for prosecutors–if they can ever get custody of the Serb defendants–is building a chain of evidence that links such crimes to Milosevic’s actions in Belgrade.

Milosevic’s moral responsibility is beyond dispute. The brutal and bloody Serb campaign to “cleanse” Kosovo of ethnic Albanians has been so pervasive and prolonged that it is impossible to view the man in charge as a bystander. Establishing criminal guilt, though, requires rigorous proof. The indictment, prepared by prosecutors of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in The Hague, outlines two ways of making the case.

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Too Much Justice

by Stuart Taylor, Jr

Harper's Magazine

I believe that justice was done. Justice is a process, not a particular result.

– Alan M. Dershowitz, Harvard law professor, commenting on the jury verdict finding John W. Hinckley, Jr., not guilty by reason of insanity when he shot President Reagan.

I do not think nobody knows what was within his head that day.

– Woodrow Johnson, parking-lot attendant, one of the Hinckley jurors, commenting on what he learned from the eight-week trial to establish what was in Hinckley’s head that day.

GUISEPPE ZANGARA climbed on a chair at Bayfront Park in Miami on February 15, 1933, and fired five shots at an open car in which President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt was talking with Chicago mayor Anton Cermak. He missed Roosevelt but hit Cermak, who died on March 6. Zan-gara’s motive, arguably the product of an insane mind, was that "since my stomach hurt, I get even with capitalists by kill the president." He was indicted for murder the day Cermak died, pleaded guilty, and was electrocuted two weeks later, complaining that there was "no one here to take my picture."

Forty-nine years later, on their second day of deliberations, the twelve jurors assigned to decide the guilt or innocence of John Hinckley, who had gunned down President Reagan and three others to win fame and to impress a movie actress, sent the judge a note, asking for a dictionary. They wanted ëto find out for ourselves, was all poetry fiction," the jury foreman, a twenty-two-year-old hotel-banquet worker named Lawrence H. Coffey, explained later to a subcommittee of gaping senators. Thus the jurors hoped to resolve a long, tangential debate between a defense lawyer, who interpreted Hinckley’s practice of scrawling morbid and bizarre images on notebook paper as proof of his insanity, and a prosecution psychiatrist, who dismissed Hinckley’s versified maunderings as "fiction."