Why vigilantism is illegal

Business and Commercial Law. Please provide a valid Zip Code or City and choose a category. Please choose a category from the list. Please select a city from the list and choose a category. Please enter a valid zip code or city. Please select a city from the list. Connecting …. Are You a Lawyer? Grow Your Practice. Jose Rivera Managing Editor Editor. Last Updated: May 8, Choose Your Legal Category: Family. Criminal Defense. Real Estate. Child Support. Other Legal Categories. X 1 Enter Zip Code or City this may not be the same place you live.

Drug Crimes. Speeding and Moving Violations. White Collar Crime. Scroll down for more categories. X Most Common Issues:. We've helped over 5 million people. Under the rule of law, laws are thought to exist independent of, and separate from, human will. Even when the human element factors into legal decision making, the decision maker is expected to be constrained by the law in making his or her decision.

In other words, police officers, judges, and juries should act according to the law and not according to their personal preferences or private agendas.

Private citizens may use force and violence to defend their lives and their property, and in some instances the lives and property of others, but they must do so under the specific circumstances allowed by the law if they wish to avoid being prosecuted for a crime themselves. Private individuals may also make "citizen arrests," but the circumstances in which the law authorizes them to do so are very narrow.

Citizens are often limited to making arrests for felonies committed in their presence. By taking law into their own hands, vigilantes flout the rule of law, effectively becoming lawmaker, police officer, judge, jury, and appellate court for the cause they are pursuing. The history of vigilantism in the United States is as old as the country itself.

In many ways, the history of the United States began with vigilantism. On December 16, , American colonists, tired of British direct taxation, took part in what came to be known as the Boston Tea Party. As part of the resistance, they threw chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Vigilantism continues to metamorphose.

Unfortunately, the U. These doctrines of disillusionment may provoke vigilante acts, but not in numbers that make it a serious practical problem. More damaging is their tendency to provoke what might be called "shadow vigilantism," in which ordinary people manipulate and subvert the criminal justice system to compel it to impose the justice that they see it as reluctant to impose.

Unfortunately, shadow vigilantism can be widespread and impossible to effectively prosecute, leaving the system's justness seriously distorted. This, in turn, can provoke a damaging anti-system response, as in the Stop Snitching movement, that further degrades the system's reputation for doing justice, producing a downward spiral of lost credibility and deference.

We would all be better off — citizens and offenders alike — if this dirty war had never started. What is needed is a re-examination of all of the doctrines of disillusionment, with an eye toward reformulating them to promote the interests they protect in ways that avoid gross failures of justice.