Prison For The Lion Killer! Prison For Everyone!

Why is the answer to everything always prison?

Like most of you, I rely on Facebook to give me important updates about the world: the birthdays of people I dimly remember; pictures of kids, vacations, and food; and, for a time that has sadly drawn to a close, updates on David Lat’s weight.

Recently though, these valuable social functions have been replaced. My Facebook feed is now lighting up with people calling for some dentist in Minnesota to be prosecuted and sent to prison for killing a lion in Zimbabwe.

Apparently, this dentist spent $50,000 to hire some hunters to help him find and kill a lion. They found a lion, he shot it with a crossbow — his weapon of choice — but didn’t kill it. The lion died later. Its cubs will likely also die because that’s how things work in the hard cruel jungle.

The lion had a name: Cecil. It was much beloved and a tourist attraction.

If you’re going to kill a lion, don’t kill a beloved lion with a cute name. They should teach that to hunters when they get a gun. People love animals with cute names. In the same way that a shooting of attractive white people is more likely to make the news than a shooting of ugly brown people, killing a named animal is going to generate more outrage on the internet than, say, this.

Probably the only part of this that I understand is that a dentist can have a sadistic streak.

Beyond that, I don’t understand why someone would spend $50,000 to kill a lion. There are a lot of strange ways to spend money, and I get that. I think, though, that if I lived in Minnesota and had an extra $50,000 burning a hole in my pocket, I would use that money to leave Minnesota. Especially now that Garrison Keillor is rumored to be retiring.

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I also don’t get hunting. Safari is nice, sure, and I appreciate goal directed activities, but killing an animal — even a really fierce one — with all the tools and weapons a person has available isn’t really sporting. I don’t know why you wouldn’t just beat up a toddler instead.

On the other side, I don’t really understand the source of the outrage. Is it that folks are outraged by hunting in general? I don’t see protests at the start of deer season. Is it the hunting in Africa? Because worse cases are routinely ignored. Is it that animals are treated poorly in the world? That seems a worthy, though unlikely, source of outrage given how most people eat.

No, it looks like the best explanation is that people don’t like it when something cute is killed. It’s the adorableness that sparks the outrage.

Though, frankly, even to say that seems trite. It’s beyond unsurprising.

The biggest thing that stumps me about this is why my Facebook friends — the same good people who like and share John Oliver’s epic treatment of mandatory minimums, cheer President Obama’s proposals for criminal justice reform, and bemoan America’s mass incarceration problem — are the exact same people who are signing petitions calling for the hunter/dentist to be prosecuted.

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Why do people reflexively think that whenever something bad happens someone should go to prison?

This reflex is exactly why we have a mass incarceration problem. We incarcerate people at rates wildly in excess of what the rest of the world does because there is something loathsomely American about using punishment as our knee jerk reaction to a policy question.

We’re herd animals, and when someone yells “Crack is bad” the whole country jumps on sending people to prison for decades for drug crimes. Enron makes the news and everyone wants executives and accountants in other companies to face prison and a longer time in prison to boot.

Leaving alone whether the lion killing dentist violated the law, or whether he took reasonable efforts not to violate the law by hiring people in Zimbabwe to help him hunt legally — that is to say, leaving alone whether he actually can lawfully be prosecuted — we have got to find a way as a society to solve problems without putting people in prison.

If we’re going to have a culture that allows hunting — and I’m not saying we should — we shouldn’t punish people who live that culture’s values. Moral outrage and calls for punishment are cheap and Facebook advocacy is so callow and cowardly that it barely deserves the term ‘advocacy.’ Trying to figure out how to build a society that reflects our values — beyond our apparent core belief that everyone who does something we happen to dislike should be in prison — is hard.

But, in our politics, we like easy. We don’t have a good record of doing what’s hard. And so, for better or worse, there is always likely to be work in America for the criminal defense lawyer.

Thanks America.


Matt Kaiser is a white-collar defense attorney at Kaiser, LeGrand & Dillon PLLC. He’s represented stockbrokers, tax preparers, doctors, drug dealers, and political appointees in federal investigations and indicted cases. Most of his clients come to the government’s attention because of some kind of misunderstanding. Matt writes the Federal Criminal Appeals Blog and has put together a webpage that’s meant to be the WebMD of federal criminal defense. His twitter handle is @mattkaiser. His email is mkaiser@kaiserlegrand.com He’d love to hear from you if you’re inclined to say something nice.