Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic FDK:Rebuilding Superman-Part 6

Hi,

Great part!

Actually, I am suprised too. Doesn't seem like a CK type of question. Or a Daily Planet type, either. I keep having to remind myself that this is a different Clark Kent. Or maybe it was just a message for Lois.

Good judge.

This reminded me of a line from Up Close & Personal when Robert Redford says, "I called the harbor master. That's what reporters do."

ohhh boy. He is absolutely right but he is going to get a lot of flack for this.

Ron's certainly got nerve.



No, he's not. This man is moody, very intense and under a lot of stress. Can Lois accept that?

Good chapter!

Maria, I believe the judge is catching on that DA Reisman isn't doing his best to win and that the DA is making some "accidental" mistakes that help his opposition.

apparently, showing the rest of the video would more than counteract the killing part for the defense, so the DA would have been better off to not request the video at all.

Hmmm, Terry. This kind of exchange is not something I would associate with either Clark, Superman or the Daily Planet. On the other hand, perhaps it's true that the readers of the Daily Planet want to know why Superman has picked two female lawyers. In a world where women are still, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, "the second sex", women are going to be oddballs because of their sex in the world of white-collar professionals, and some people of Metropolis might conceivably wonder if Superman has chosen his attorneys mainly because he wants to have a good time with them.

Very interesting. So if the judge has decided that Superman aboslutely mustn't leave the courtroom while the court is in session, then he would stay put even if there was a huge, major natural catastrophe occurring somewhere. In a way, I think I approve. It needs to be demonstrated to people what it would mean if Superman was sentenced to prison and was unable to help out at disaster sites.

And this is where I still don't know if I understand what you are trying to tell us here. In your answer to my FDK on part five of this story, you said:

I understand that you can't be found guilty of a crime in the eyes of the law unless the legal system can prove that you are guilty of exactly the crime you are being accused of. In Sweden a couple of years ago, two men broke into a house owned by an old man to burglarize it. When they got inside, they found the old man at home, and one of the burglars grabbed a frying pan from the kitchen and hit the old man on the head so that he died. The two burglars were quickly seized and brought to trial for murder. However, it turned out to be impossible to prove which of them had actually hit the old man with the frying pan, and since the prosecutor had only asked that the men should be found guilty of murder, not of complicity in murder, both had to be found not guilty of murdering the victim. In the eyes of the law these two men were innocent, but in the eyes of the public they were despicable murderers.

It seems to me that Superman is saying that he wants to be found really innocent in the eyes of the public. He wants the American people to say that his killing of Billy Church was not reprehensible in any way. Clearly he wants to be found not guilty of any crime in the eyes of the law, too, but it may be even more important to him to be exonerated in the eyes of the public. And I don't understand how he can believe that all of the American public, except perhaps a small, perhaps xenophobic or badly educated part of it, will honestly think that he did nothing wrong when he ripped Billy Church's heart out.

I just want to point out that if the legal system wanted to incapacitate Superman, it could do so by subjecting him to Kryptonite.

So Superman is still saying that it might have been legally as well as morally right to rip Billy Church's heart out. I don't know, Terry. When I read "The Maysonry of Life", I got the impression that Superman had been pushed past his own limits, and that he killed Billy Church in a fit of uncontrollable rage. I'm not questioning the fact that Superman's killing of Billy Church had the extremely beneficial effect of destroying Intergang, and I'm all for a trial that considers the good things that came out of Superman's bloodying of his own hands. But a society that declares a man innocent when he kills because he can't control his own fury... Terry, I don't want to live in a society like that.

I suspect that you will find a way to acquit Superman of any crime, even though I may certainly be jumping to conclusions here. In any case, I do expect you not to sentence him to prison, if only because I think that that would be the wrong thing to do in this case! And if Superman is found sufficiently innocent not to have to go to prison, he will have to consider his own future. Where does he go from here? Who is is now? What if the court finds his killing of Billy Church morally reprehensible, even if they could not find him guilty of a crime? How can he be Superman if he has offcially been slapped on the fingers because of what he did to Billy Church? And how can he be with Lois?

In this chapter Clark goes on being Superman, carrying out his Superman rescues, but he is tense and angry. And it is already becoming harder and harder for him to be with Lois:

When Clark killed Billy Church he bit into his own fruit of knowledge from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The knowledge he got from eating that fruit changed him every bit as much as a woman may be changed from losing her virginity and perhaps becoming pregnant with a child. I think Clark is trying to deliver a "child" of his own, the man he is going to be after the legal system has questioned him and sentenced him. Not unlike the way God questioned Adam and Eve, by the way, and passed judgement on them.

Ann

P.S. I found it very interesting that the DA, Jack Reisman, possibly wants to lose his own case. Well, well, well. He is not thinking only of his own glory, then.

Ann, your comments are, as always, most thought-provoking. I want to respond to just one of them, however, since it stood out to me.

I know absolutely nothing about Swedish law except that it resembles both English common law and American law. In the US, if someone loses his or her temper and kills another person over something that isn't worth a life, such as stealing something of little value or trading verbal insults, it's a prosecutable crime.

But let me tell you about a true incident that took place in Texas in the mid 90's which stirred up a firestorm of controversy. A black man in his mid-20s (who was later revealed to be a drug dealer and thief and had assaulted several people) chased and shot to death his girlfriend just outside the exit to a large shopping mall. The reports said that he shot her until she fell, and because she was still moving, he stood over her and shot her in the head, killing her.

A white man had just driven into the parking lot and witnessed this murder. He had just left a shooting range and his personal weapon was (according to law) now unloaded and secured in a locked box in the back seat of his car. In the time it took the original killer to walk (yes, he walked, he didn't run) to his car, the new arrival had unlocked his gun box, loaded his weapon, and exited his vehicle. The man ran to the killer's car, pointed his pistol at the driver, and shouted for him to stop and exit the car.

The driver tried to escape. The man with the pistol shot the driver and killed him, then left the scene. After the police arrived and the news media began broadcasting the story, however, he contacted the police and surrendered peacefully.

Much public outcry ensued. Some of it was anger that the man had taken the law into his own hands. Some was racially motivated; there were black people outraged that a white man had killed a black man in broad daylight (never mind the dead woman, who was also black), and there were white people who were glad that a white man had killed a black man in broad daylight.

(Neither of those viewpoints are my own, and, in fact, both are equally abhorrent to me because they place a false racial difference above the issue of right and wrong. I strive to be skin color-blind, but I know I fall short of my own ideal. Still trying, though.)

I don't know how likely a scenario such as this would be in any of the other countries of other FOLCs, but the end result was that the second shooter was no-billed by the grand jury. That means that no charges were brought against him, because the state of Texas determined that he was acting not as a vigilante but as a concerned citizen who was defending the rights and safety of other law-abiding citizens. This incident took place before the state of Texas enacted its current conceal-and-carry laws allowing citizens to carry guns.

Why did I even bring this up? To illustrate that there are occasions where the law and society both admit that the deliberate killing of another person is justified. The man who shot the killer in his car was quoted as saying that he couldn't allow the killer to get away scot free, especially since he'd just murdered a woman in broad daylight.

I know this is a controversial subject, and I know that not everyone who reads this story will like it, and I know that some won't read it at all because of the subject matter. That's okay. But what I find interesting is how close you came to making an absolute moral judgement, Ann. I know how passionate you are about women's causes, and you also know that I do not disagree with most of what you say on the subject, at least in principle. But moral absolutes are impossible without appealing to some moral authority higher than societal norms. And because a legal system can regulate actions but not attitudes, it can never be the moral arbiter of the people.

Because the law can judge our actions but not our attitudes, we can't derive moral guidance from it. I may need to rephrase Superman's response to Clark's question about killing Bill Church and limit it to the legal aspects of the case.

Thanks for your thoughtful and thought-provoking comments, Ann. You (and many others on these boards) have the gift of disagreeing without attacking, and I appreciate it. Thanks to all who've left comments, and I promise things will all work out in the end.

And I'll be interested to hear from all of you on the issue of Superman's guilt after both the prosecution and the defense had posted their closing arguments. Of course, that won't be for a while yet.

In Sweden, unless you are a police officer on duty, carrying a gun in public is against the law. Doing so constitutes a crime in itself.

In Sweden, if you shoot and kill somebody, unless you are a police officer on duty trying to capture an apparently dangerous individual, you have automatically committed a crime. If the case you described had happened in Sweden, the white man who shot the black man would automatically be found guilty of murder. He would have committed the crime of using his weapon on another person despite not being a police officer, and he would have committed the additional crime of firing on a person who was not, at the moment when the other person shot him, actively threatening anybody, and he would have committed the further crime of shooting another person to death. He would most definitely have been found guilty of murder and sentenced to - I'm guessing here - perhaps five to ten years in prison.

What about people in Sweden who kill other people in self defence? Terry, all I can say is that "ordinary people" don't do that sort of thing here. It's true. "Ordinary people" don't carry guns. Some "ordinary people" do own guns, and they usually live in rural areas and use their guns for hunting. But the idea of getting the gun you keep somewhere in your home for hunting and using it to fire on and possibly kill another person - I honestly think it's not a thing that "ordinary people" in Sweden will allow themselves to do. Heavy criminals shoot and kill other people, that is most certainly true. But shooting people is a criminal thing. In Sweden, if you are prepared to shoot and kill another person, then you are also prepared to consider yourself a member of the criminal world. Either that, or you are a police officer.

I remember a couple of years ago when a teenaged girl stabbed her father at night for terrorising his family. I don't remember what punishment she got, and I think it was relatively light, since it appeared true that the father had indeed treated his family very badly. However, this girl was not found innocent. In Sweden, you don't stab a sleeping person to death and then try to tell other people that you haven't committed a crime.

So when I say that Superman should absolutely be found guilty of some sort of crime after ripping Billy Church's heart out, then I guess I judging him according to my own Swedish morals, and according to the way he would be judged at a Swedish court. Because in Sweden, you see, he would not have been found completely innocent.

Ann

Terry, this was another terrific chapter!

I admit, I was a little bit taken aback at first when Clark asked such pointed, tactless questions about Constance and Blair. But the more I mulled it over, the more I realized that it makes perfect sense. Though it's still a little bit disconcerting to see Clark stoop to National Whisper tactics, I think he's *purposefully* making a point to ask these kinds of questions to a) prove that The Daily Planet isn't going to coddle Superman during interviews and b) it's kind of a pre-emptive strike. It's brilliant, really: Ask the tasteless questions before any other reporter does (effectively containing any potential fallout)!

And my heart was in my throat the entire time Clark was battling to save the Queen of Colombia. When he unleashed his frustration and his fury on the camera crew, I was an empathetic mess.

And this!
Oh. My. Lord. Such heart-wrenching introspection. I ache when I read this passage.

Seriously, Terry, this story just keeps getting better. Thanks for sharing it with us!

P.S. Your Jack Reisman is so compelling — I love how you've written him. How he ultimately wants to lose this case but won't allow himself to bring anything but his A-game to the courtroom. *hearts the inner conflict at work*