[Finger Cookin]

http://www.vox.com/2015/7/30/9074865...er-mob-justice

Mob justice is not justice

One of the reasons we have a justice system is to punish criminals for wrongdoing, both to serve the abstract ideal of justice and to deter future criminal acts. The idea is that if you are considering committing a crime, you will understand that the justice system has a high probability of catching you and enacting a certain punishment.

Mob justice does not accomplish this, and often does the opposite. One of the biggest reasons is that it is applied extremely inconsistently, even randomly.

The internet mob just so happened to avenge this particular case of a hunter seemingly illegally killing a rare wild animal, but not other cases. Defenders of the anti-Palmer campaign argue that this is irrelevant: Palmer did something wrong and deserves to be punished regardless of whether other people also did something wrong.

But that misunderstands how justice, mob or formal, is supposed to work. It treats justice as a sort of random lightning bolt from the sky; one is reminded of the vengeful but arbitrary gods of Greek or Roman lore. If you are a would-be big-game poacher, the lesson you might draw is not that poaching will be punished, but rather that poaching is permissible as long as it only kills animals that are not likely to become beloved on social media. Indeed, that seems to be the lesson that Palmer himself has drawn from the backlash: In a recent statement he apologized for killing a lion "who was a known, local favorite," not for hunting lions in general.