Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

One of the best reasons why the War on Terror mindset is such a poor one is that there’s no defined end point, no single enemy to defeat, no one entity to make surrender. And so, we give more power to the government in war time, as we’ve always done, but this time it’s not clear if the government will ever give up that power. And, at the same time, not only will exceptional situation become permanent, but it will also expand outwards, with the government using power given to it to prevent terrorism and instead using it to…prosecute gang members:

Jurors for the first time found a defendant guilty under New York’s statute, and he did not fit the stereotype of a terrorist. The defendant, Edgar Morales, is a 25-year-old recreational soccer player and gang member who fatally shot a 10-year-old girl and wounded a second man outside a christening party in 2002.

Even if the prosecutor is right, and what this street gang was doing was equivalent to terrorism, there’s still a basic dishonesty in using anti-terrorism laws to prosecute street crimes. The anti-terror laws were clearly designed to make the government more able to punish and prosecute foreign threats who were trying to commit large scale crimes against the whole nation of the US, which street crime doesn’t fall under. This application of anti-terror laws sidesteps an important debate that should occur among our elected representatives, not prosecutors. Do we consider street crime to be on the same level as terrorism, do we want to similarly give the government power in an effort to prevent street crime as we do with terrorism?

Another problem with the wide use of anti-terror legislation is that it further entrenches what should be “exceptional” measures into our justice system. Let’s say the political environment changes so that the scaling back of anti-terror government powers is possible. In a world where there’s widespread use of anti-terror laws for crimes that aren’t terrorism, there will another strong constituency who want to keep these measures on the books. We could imagine an organization of DAs making ads saying “thanks to this anti-terror measure, we’ve been able to increase our prosecution of gangs by 31%.” This will make returning to our pre-WOT legal system even more difficult.