The Problem With Show Trials
The difficulty with Show Trials is that justice is supposed to be blind, so what’s to ‘show?’
History hasn’t meted out justice very even-handedly across the decades in show trials and what worked reasonably well at Nurnberg after World War II has been far less successful with the likes of O.J. Simpson, Yugoslavia’s Milosevic, Iraq’s Saddam and lately, America’s sentencing trial of terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui. Big shows, every one. Mixed successes, but mostly duds.
Taking them one by one, the Nazi trials at Nurnberg worked (for the most part) because there were a wide range of defendants and some were acquitted, some sentenced to prison for varying terms and some to death. Nurnberg was staged by the victors. That’s a given. War covers a multitude of crimes and who gets charged by whom depends on which side is left standing at the end of the battles. Hitler didn’t get his chance at Nurnberg and no doubt that helped. The docks were full of petty criminals, Bugs Moran Chicago-thug types, b…