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Over the long timespans of human evolution I’m willing to bet that this is a significant selective pressure.. bullies probably just disappeared or were kicked out of the community to fend for themselves
To be clear, community murders like this happened all the time in US history. The thing that makes this special is that the man killed was white and actually guilty of crimes.
You were half right until you dug into the helplessly racist narrative. The wild west had many incidences of such events and the victims were often white. One need only look at the story of Billy the Kid and the regulators or Wyatt Earp's arc for evidence. The only thing that makes this unusual is it was in 1981. EDIT: person I'm responding to makes the case that this case is SPECIAL in U.S. history and draws a direc…
Over the long timespans of human evolution I’m willing to bet that this is a significant selective pressure.. bullies probably just disappeared or were kicked out of the community to fend for themselves
> frontier justice came for McElroy courtesy of the residents of Skidmore (population 440 at the time of the crime). Shaken by the man’s ability to evade jail even after being convicted of a near-fatal attack on a grocery store owner... Belkin also details Skidmore’s plague of subsequent violence ... the series persuasively contends that these crimes indicate that the McElroy episode taught younger Skidmore generatio…
This man was tried and convicted by a jury of his peers, it was just in a different courtroom.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it seems like a more extreme version of jury nullification. if it became widespread, it would essentially be the end of rule-of-law. but in isolated and rare situations, perhaps it's a beneficial escape valve? easy to suggest from my comfy office in a quiet suburb of course.
It's not a 'beneficial escape valve' when the community decides to, say, kill the n_______ who had the audacity to sleep with a white woman. Which is a far more common application of lynching. We should not be glorifying this.
This is still going on in Alaska, many remote areas have some bullies getting away due to no police. I'm sure some end up missing too, but there is a big lack of funding for state marshals to deal with the problems.
> frontier justice came for McElroy courtesy of the residents of Skidmore (population 440 at the time of the crime). Shaken by the man’s ability to evade jail even after being convicted of a near-fatal attack on a grocery store owner... Belkin also details Skidmore’s plague of subsequent violence ... the series persuasively contends that these crimes indicate that the McElroy episode taught younger Skidmore generatio…
To be clear, community murders like this happened all the time in US history. The thing that makes this special is that the man killed was white and actually guilty of crimes.
100% true. This is the history of lynching in America. Community murders where nobody saw a thing, and the justification was always that the murdered person was a degenerate who would not receive what the town thinks would be adequate punishment under the law.
https://www.quora.com/Did-slave-masters-actually-lynch-slave...