On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears Read Free Page B

County Public Defender’s Office. Like dozens of previous grisly crimes, this one ended up on his desk within hours of the formal charge. My first reaction to hearing about the case was to recoil at the very sight of “monster Hobbs,” so dubbed by the strident CNN legal commentator Nancy Grace, but my second reaction was “How can anyone defend this monster?”
    The Public Defender’s Office, and in particular my brother’s job, is a gruesome world of mutilated bodies, rape, insanity, arson, guns, drugs, mendacity, and sadism. It is a place where the most monstrous of human behaviors are on display. But my brother’s position is that “monsters” are matters of perception. A person is demonized, according to him, by people who stand to benefit from the derogatory labeling. Monsters are“constructed” and serve as scapegoats for expedient political agendas. He, and most other public defenders, make a heuristic commitment to the innocence of their clients. My brother assumes that everybody he defends is (at least from 9 to 5) misunderstood. Hobbs’s defense team argued, for example, that his confession was coerced by police who kept him awake and under questioning for an unhealthy stretch of time. The recent spate of death row pardons based on DNA evidence (even when there were confessions) makes this a more reasonable position than it first appears. Whether or not Hobbs committed the murder is something for a jury to decide. But his defenders cannot think of him as a monster if they are to do their jobs effectively. In addition, Dave must emotionally distance himself, for professional reasons, from the murders themselves. “I have looked at photos,” he explains, “of the most grisly murders—sometimes for a whole year straight, everyday—but I cannot look at the victims as little girls or whatever the case may be. I must look at them, study them forensically, as
evidence
.” When I press my brother, he admits that, yes, whoever did kill these little girls is a monster, but
on the job
he must adopt the working hypothesis that the killer is not his client (or in other cases, that his client may have done the deed but has mitigating issues).
    It’s worth noting, too, that the nature of most client-council relations would tend to bring the humanity of the accused to the forefront, would tend to de-monster them. The defender always sees another side of the accused than the wider public does. This is not, I suspect, the result of some deep moral mission or heart-of-gold goodwill on the part of the defender, but rather the result of mundane daily interactions and conversations. Over the course of many interviews and meetings, accused criminals and their counsel often end up sharing cigarettes and chatting about everything from recent sports scores to their similar musical tastes. The person you are defending may or may not actually be a monster, but it must be harder and harder to see him as such if you get to know him. 17
UNMANAGEABLE
     
    Of course not all monsters are evil. Dragons in China, for example, are so loved that the Chinese consider themselves to be the “children of the dragon.” 18 Some monsters start out harmless, but their own nature forces a turn toward malevolence. Mary Shelley’s creature in
Frankenstein
is perhaps the most famous of the gentle-hearted giants gone bad. It is the failure of Victor Frankenstein and society generally to provide a space for him in the human family that turns the creature into a monster. “Shalleach man,” the creature bitterly asks, “find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone?” 19 The creature is so alienated that he cannot even find solidarity with the nonhuman animals. This novel gives us a glimpse into the subjective interior of the monster’s life and gives us a tragic archetype of the misunderstood outcast.

     
    The Golem is a bumbling monster of Jewish folklore. The clay creature was animated by Rabbi Judah Loew to