Revenge, Justice, and the Law

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38 THE WAYNE LAW REVIEW [Vol. 50:4 Heller meets her father, who he discovers is a survivor of the Holocaust. The father tells Heller that the Nazis killed his first wife and their two daughters. To avenge their deaths, he spent three years after the war, searching for the doctor who had ordered their deaths, and when he found him, he tells Heller, “with these hands, I strangled him.” Heller, struggling with his own desire for revenge, points out to the father that the killing of the doctor had not brought back to life his dead wife and children. The father, upset that the young man had not understood the point of his story, responds that “it brought me back.” 160 In that brief exchange, Littell captures the essence of revenge. The Nazis had done more than enslave, torture and kill the father’s family. They also robbed him of his dignity, forcing him to accept the reality of his powerlessness to do anything to protect his family from their fate. By tracking down and personally punishing at least one of the individuals responsible for these atrocities, the father was able to reclaim some of what had been taken from him. True, he could not recover his dead family, but he was able to reclaim his human dignity and power, and thus return to the world of the living. In that sense, revenge can be an ennobling, as well as an enabling, concept. While the dangers of revenge systems of justice have been extensively discussed in this Essay, 161 revenge cultures also contained positive elements; elements which are missing in our current system of justice. Most notably, revenge cultures provided a mechanism by which victims could regain their sense of power and honor. Revengers could personally “get even” with their victimizers, and thus reassert their status within their society. Revenge cultures encompassed a sense of self worth; that is, the recognition that no one had the right to inflict unprovoked harm upon another, and that when another did so, it was the victim, and not the community at large, who had primarily been wronged. As such, the victim had the right (or in some cultures the duty), to personally recapture his respect and honor. In effect, cultures which permitted revenge, allowed 160. Id. at 49-50. At the end of the novel, Heller avenges his fiancé’s murder by killing Schiller, her murderer. He is assisted in his quest by a Professor Lako, who, unbeknownst to Heller, also had a revenge motive to kill Schiller. Heller asks the Professor whether the revenge was worth it, to which the Professor responds “It was . . . . very satisfying. And you?” Heller confesses that he would not do it again but “it was just as advertised. It brought me back from the dead.” Id. at 246-47. 161. See supra notes 10-18, 100-26 and accompanying text.
2005] VICTIM’S DESIRE FOR VENGEANCE 39 those victims strong enough (or from families with sufficient strength) to erase the psychological stigma of their victimhood. 162 And yet, as illustrated by the excerpt by Jon Elster cited at the beginning of this section, many philosophers believe that revenge serves no benefit, to either society as a whole, or to individual members of society who have been victimized by violent crime. Elster regards revenge as irrational, since “Rational individuals follow the principles of letting bygones be bygones, cutting their losses and ignoring sunk costs, whereas the avenger typically refuses to forget an affront or harm to which he has been exposed.” 163 Others go even further in decrying revenge, for while conceding that such emotions are “understandable” and “entirely human,” 164 they believe that revenge is per se immoral because it is motivated by the victim’ s taking “pleasure in the suffering of another.” 165 One reads that revenge is considered to be evil because “[H]atred and pleasure. . . . combine so unpleasantly,” 166 or hears, as I did at a recent faculty colloquium, that desires to punish for retributive purposes are simply “craven,” and thus should be dismissed out of hand. 162. BARTON, supra note 30, at 39-40. 163. Elster, supra note 52, at 362. 164. Seymour Halleck, Vengeance and Victimization, 5 VICTIMOLOGY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL 99 (1980) [AUTHOR PROVIDE SOURCE]. Admittedly, Professor Halleck does recognize the need for victims to “get in touch with their feelings of rage,” in order to avoid “excessive psychological suffering.” However, he implicitly rejects any acting out of the revenge desire, since “just deserts is responsive to limited social needs and it directly and indirectly leads to neglect of the victim.” Id. at 99. More recent commentators have expressed the same concern. For example, Professor Lynne Henderson, in her article Co-opting Compassion: The Federal Victim’s Rights Amendment, expresses her concern that the victim rights movement, in general, and the Amendment in specific, have stressed retribution as the sole remedy for victims, at the cost of further emotionally damaging the victim. Henderson, supra note 92, at 606. To some degree, I concur with both Professors’ reservations. This Essay does not argue that the acting out of revenge is the only, best, or even appropriate response for all victims. What it does suggest, however, is that state regulated revenge- where the victim is empowered, under law, to partake in the punishment rendering decision- may, for some victims, be the only, best, or at least a helpful means to effectuate their recovery. It is just with the supposition that revenge can never perform such a service that I take exception. 165. NOZICK, supra note 30, at 367. See also MURPHY, supra note 79, at 89 (equating vengeance with “a hatred that seems to take delight in their [wrongdoers] suffering.”). 166. GLOVER, supra note 93, at 145.
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