Constitutional Law
Jul. 12, 2002
Movie Alerts People to U.S. Abuses of Individual Rights
Forum Column - By Stephen F. Rohde - "The guilty are arrested before the law is broken." Are these the words of Attorney General John Ashcroft or a TV ad for Steven Spielberg's new movie "Minority Report"?
Stephen F. Rohde
Email: rohdevictr@aol.com
Stephen is a retired civil liberties lawyer and contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, is author of American Words for Freedom and Freedom of Assembly.
Forum Column
By Stephen F. Rohde
"The guilty are arrested before the law is broken." Are these the words of Attorney General John Ashcroft or a TV ad for Steven Spielberg's new movie "Minority Report"?
Four years ago, when Spielberg and Tom Cruise teamed to bring Philip K. Dick's futurist tale "Minority Report" to the screen, the idea of prosecuting people before they commit a crime was purely the stuff of science fiction.
But the U.S. government is pursuing law enforcement techniques in the name of combating terrorism that would have been unthinkable before Sept. 11.
"Minority Report" imagines that, in the year 2054, the Justice Department's elite Pre-Crime Unit, headed by Chief John Anderton (Cruise), has eliminated murder from Washington, D.C., by arresting people before they kill.
In a facility hidden deep within the Justice Department, the brain waves of three psychic "pre-cogs" named Agatha (Christie?), Dashiel (Hammett?) and Arthur (Conan Doyle?), who can foresee the time, place and details of murders, are captured by advanced technology, giving Anderton and his team time to track down and apprehend the "pre-perpetrators" and save the victims.
Without an indictment, trial or legal representation, the "pre-offenders" are whisked away and permanently incarcerated in life-sustaining capsules at the Department of Containment.
No one is more supportive of the Pre-Crime Unit than Anderton, until one day when the pre-cogs see Anderton himself committing a murder in the very near future, setting off all the spills and thrills for which Spielberg is so famous.
But along the way, the film raises some serious questions not only about self-determination and free will but also about the price that a society is willing to pay to be safe. That question could not be more timely, and it unexpectedly transforms "Minority Report" from another intriguing sci-fi thriller into a timely and urgent wake-up call about what could happen if the government persists in sacrificing fundamental civil liberties in the name of making us safe.
Just as the promoters of the Pre-Crime Unit offer soothing reassurances of how foolproof the system is, Ashcroft has trumpeted the advantages of redirecting the immense resources of the Justice Department and the FBI away from prosecuting crimes and into "prevention."
The details of what prevention means remain ominously unclear, but the term sounds hauntingly like "pre-crime." The dangerous premise is the notion of preventing crimes before they happen by arresting people and detaining them indefinitely, without trial and legal representation, because the government believes they will commit crimes.
Isn't that what the government is doing to Jose Padilla, aka Abdullah al-Muhajir, the American citizen arrested May 8 at O'Hare Airport in Chicago and being held indefinitely in a military detention center without access to a lawyer because the administration believes he intended to build and explode a "dirty bomb"?
And on a far more catastrophic scale, President Bush has announced an unprecedented pre-emptive strike policy, involving the use of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons against hostile nations before they attack us.
In his short story, Dick describes the threats posed by the Pre-Crime Unit. A critic of the system points out that "there can be no valid knowledge about the future [and that] the whole sinister fraud which the police have operating [has led to] unjust arrests of countless individuals."
No wonder a loyal but ambitious high-ranking Justice Department lawyer in the film assures Anderton, "I'm not with the ACLU on this."
Indeed, after listening to Cruise describe the Pre-Crime Unit on the "Today" show, host Matt Lauer called it "the ACLU's worst nightmare."
But Ashcroft's prevention policy, Bush's pre-emptive policy and the whole range of actions taken to racially profile, detain and selectively fingerprint or deport individuals from the Middle East and Central Asia and eavesdrop on attorney-client communications are not only a nightmare but also dangerously real and taking place right now.
"Minority Report" could alert millions of moviegoers, who rarely think about due process, the right to legal counsel and the role of an independent judiciary in our democracy, to the threats posed by a government that ignores precious constitutional rights.
Stephen Rohde is author of "American Words of Freedom" (Webster's New World 2001) and immediate past president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.
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