Justified or Just Making Excuses?
ALEXANDER DICK
“He pulled first. I was justified.” This is Justified’s refrain, at least in Season One. When Raylan Givens shoots Tommy Bucks on a rooftop patio in Miami, he not only sets in motion the plot for the entire series; he also begins an enquiry into the meaning of the word that titles the show. What does it mean to be “justified”? Perhaps it’s better to ask: What does it mean to say “I am justified?”
Every time that Raylan says “He pulled first; I was justified” he’s on trial, either officially by the US Marshall’s Service Board of Inquiry, or informally by his boss, Art Mullen, or his ex-wife, Winona Hawkins. In all instances, Raylan says the same thing in the same deliberate matter-of-fact way, as if the force of the statement and the manner in which he performs it will prove its plain moral truth.
But no one’s really convinced. Chief Deputy Dan Grant, Raylan’s boss in Miami, tells Raylan right after the shooting in the pilot episode that his justification plea will have no bearing. “It’s not about who pulled first. Remember that nut-head who pulled a shotgun. That was on page nine. This, this is going on the nightly news.”
When Raylan speaks before the Board of Inquiry, he is terse and emphatic: “let’s get this over with: he pulled first; I was justified.” In other words, let’s just go through the formula that will allow us to accept that I committed the act, but also agree that it was not wrong. He makes the same kind of claim to Art Mullen, his boss in Kentucky, and to the federal investigator prosecuting his case.
At the end of the pilot, Raylan himself confesses to Winona that he may have had reasons for shooting Tommy other than self-defense. Raylan and Tommy had both been looking for a money-launderer named Roland Pike in Nicaragua when Tommy caught Raylan and made him watch as Tommy blew another, unnamed man’s head off by lighting a stick of dynamite in his mouth. In telling her this story, Raylan explains to Winona that he might have killed Tommy to appease a personal desire for revenge. This would entail that Raylan’s motives didn’t lie within the realm of legal justification—a situation he can’t comprehend. “What troubles me is: what if he hadn’t? What if he just sat there let the clock run out. Would I have killed him anyway? I know I wanted to. I guess I just never thought of myself as an angry man.” Winona’s reply puts the statement into an entirely different register: “Raylan, . . . you do a good job of hiding it but, honestly, you are the angriest man I have ever known.”
Denial
So if Raylan can’t justify himself, what can he do? In his famous article, “A Plea for Excuses,” the twentieth-century philosopher J.L. Austin pointed out that there’s a difference between justifying an action and excusing it. According to Austin, we justify an action when we admit that it appears bad but explain that we had legitimate reasons for committing it. We excuse an action when we accept that it’s bad but explain that we did not intend to commit it. I justify myself when I say that I pushed an innocent person down in order to save him from being hit by a passing bicycle. I excuse myself when I say that I pushed him down because someone else pushed me. “In the one defense,” Austin writes, “we accept responsibility by denying that it was bad; in the other we accept that it was bad but don’t accept full, or indeed any, responsibility.”
Since Austin, many philosophers and legal thinkers have pointed out that excuses and justifications are sometimes not easily distinguished. Take, for instance, the type of justification used by Raylan when he shoots Tommy Bucks: self-defense. Someone is about to commit an act of violence or force against me: I defend myself but in the course of that defense I maim or kill my assailant. “He pulled first; I was justified.”
But does self-defense always justify? As in the many cases of the stand-your-ground law in Florida (where the show’s opening segment and other important scenes take place), if harm to the defendant is neither inevitable nor immediate, than self-defense can’t be a justifiable reason for what is, effectively, homicide. Yet the point of the self-defense claim (and others like it) is that I don’t need to justify deathly harm. If I was in a state of fear or disturbance (all claims that have been used in Florida and other jurisdictions), then I can be acquitted, even though the act in question would otherwise be considered criminal.
These are excuses, not justifications. But to what extent can an excuse really reduce my responsibility in a moral or a legal sense? The point is that in either case any claim requires outside corroboration and independent judgment. Someone needs to validate the excuse in order for it to be valid, strictly speaking. We can justify or excuse our actions, but those assertions can only be proven efficacious if they are acceptable to a legal authority, a judge or jury. Justified’s opening segment doesn’t give us enough information to establish that verdict clearly. Did Tommy intend to shoot Raylan—as Raylan implies he did—or merely threaten him? Did Raylan plan to shoot Tommy before arriving at the hotel? We know there’s more to Raylan’s case then the fact that “he pulled first.” But what that more is, isn’t made clear.
Ava’s Crowder’s shooting of her husband, Bowman, which takes place before the show begins (we never see Bowman) parallels the moral dilemma underlying Givens’s shooting of Tommy Bucks. Recent moves in both American and Canadian law to allow women who kill their abusive husbands to plead self-defense (as Ava does) rather than to plead psychological incapacity (what used to be known as “battered wife syndrome”) reflect a general trend in criminal law toward justification rather than excuse in such cases.
Justification implies that a decision to commit a lethal act was made for the purpose of preserving not only the life of an individual in a situation of unspeakable horror but also her dignity in the face of legal proceedings that might incline to bias against her. Indeed, Ava’s plea of manslaughter and subsequent parole for killing Bowman suggests that this moral shift is only partially complete in the Kentucky legal system. But it also points to doubts about the kinds of verdicts that all such situations can inspire.
Do Bowman’s unquestionably horrendous acts of violence against his wife necessarily justify his murder, essentially making murder “right”? Or do they excuse her actions, lessening her culpability for an act that is still morally and legally wrong? If this is the case, then the broader implications of the justification-excuse problem become apparent: how far can issues like domestic violence be used to excuse what would otherwise be criminal activity? In this respect, Bowman Crowder’s death serves to highlight the broader political and social implications for the seemingly a-political murder of Tommy Buck’s.
The Hammer
Another character who embodies the complexities within the self-defense claim is Mike “the Hammer” Reardon, an incidental character in much of the show, but critical to the episode in which he first appears (“The Hammer”). Reardon is a hanging judge: he never allows criminal acts to be excused by mitigating social or economic circumstances. At the end of “The Hammer,” Reardon is confronted by a former defendant seeking revenge for fifteen years’ incarceration for the relatively benign charge of possessing marijuana with intent to sell.
The man’s aim was to shoot the judge so that Raylan would shoot him in the mistaken belief that at his death life insurance would go to his estranged wife and child. Reardon shoots but only maims the man, later thanking Raylan for forcing him to miss—though that was not Raylan’s intention. It turns out that the tough-talking judge has never actually killed anyone and appears horrified by the very idea. The point is that the judge’s commitment to clear distinctions between right (justified) and wrong (criminal acts) fails him when he’s involved in a situation that doesn’t manifest straightforward distinctions.
Speech and Performance
In his book How to Do Things with Words (1962), J.L. Austin pointed out that some statements don’t describe matters of fact but make things happen. The statement ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’ causes two people to become married (as long as the statement is uttered under the right legal conditions). The statement ‘I promise to meet you for lunch tomorrow’ causes a promise to come into existence (as long as it is uttered under the right circumstances, for instance, not in a theatrical production). These statements are not truth-statements, either true or false, but what Austin called performatives, made under the right or the wrong conditions.
Sometimes it may not be clear whether a statement is a truth-statement or a performative. In the very first scene of Justified, Raylan’s part of his conversation with Tommy Bucks is limited to what appear to be a series of truth-statements, mainly how much time Tommy has left before Raylan will shoot him, delivered in a typical “matter-of-fact” way that Raylan likes to speak. Tommy’s responses, though, show that he is more interested in the performative aspect of the statements than Raylan is:
TOMMY: Have a meal with me. Okay? You hungry? I swear, you pass up, these are the best crab cakes in town, I swear to God. Much better than that crap we were eating in Nicaragua. . . .
RAYLAN: I didn’t mind it. They had some pork dish I quite liked. One minute.
TOMMY: About a second ago you said it was two minutes. What’s going on here?
RAYLAN: Time flies, huh?
TOMMY: You, you’re a character. I was telling my friends this morning how yesterday you was coming to me . . . ‘If you don’t get outa here in twenty-four hours I’m gonna shoot you on sight’. C’mon, what is that? They thought it was a joke? They started laughing.
At first glance, this scene seems to dramatize the difference between Raylan’s commitment to “truth” (which is also at the bottom of his sense of justification) and Tommy’s more social sense of the way what we say is founded on our performance of certain roles and conventions: invitations to share a meal, for instance. Tommy even calls Raylan a “character” as if to open the scene to its dramatic quality.
In Tommy’s reckoning, the success of statements depends on their uptake by the person with whom we are dealing or the standards of social decorum that condition them. This uptake is in turn what guarantees the legitimacy of actions. Raylan, by contrast, is making statements of truth about the food and the time, but these seeming matters-of-fact (the quality of pork, the duration of a minute) are actually premised on his exclusive authority, which, in Tommy’s mind, has impeded on the equilibrium of their relationship.
His decision not to kill Raylan in Nicaragua implicitly means to Tommy that Raylan is bound never to kill him; their mutual preservation at any point of contact is determined in large part by the way they remain tied to rules of practice or decorum. Raylan, by contrast, is making promises that he clearly has no authority to make or to keep (either by criminal law or by criminal custom) such that they sound like “a joke.” In Tommy’s inimitable phrase, Raylan’s statements are “supreme bullshit.”
The situation is somewhat different in the pilot’s climactic scene: when Raylan goes to Ava’s house to confront Boyd Crowder, finding him eating fried chicken and nursing a .44 magnum. Boyd asks Raylan a series of factual questions: “When you shot that gun thing in Miami, was there food on the table?” “You had your gun. What kind of gun was it?” Boyd also repeats some of Tommy’s own mannerisms, inviting Raylan to eat and declaring “bullshit” when Raylan says his gun was indeed holstered. Boyd then rehearses Raylan’s ultimatum to Tommy Bucks and even changes the time as Raylan himself had done. Boyd, in other words, is creating the conditions that will “justify” murdering Raylan by reiterating what he takes to be the successful set-up that Raylan himself had maintained. It’s when Ava enters, to repeat her own killing of Bowman, that the episode really reverts to a repetition of Raylan’s shooting of Tommy Bucks. But neither Raylan nor Ava can kill Boyd. Both guns “misfire”—a word that Austin adopts for situations in which peformatives don’t work because of insincerity or lack of uptake.
Fire in the Hole!
Boyd doesn’t die as Tommy Bucks did. He lives. In his own phrase, he’s “reborn.” And he credits God for this miracle:
I have this belief, this conviction, that it wasn’t just an accident . . . last night I woke up and knew why you didn’t kill me. I was laying here, in pain, in awful pain. But I didn’t hit the pump because I knew it wasn’t just pain from a gunshot womb. It was something deeper, a pain from my very soul. I realized that I couldn’t any more blame you for my situation here than a farmer could blame his neighbor for a hailstorm. . . . God was acting through you, Raylan, through your gun to get my attention, to set me on a new course. Now I know not yet what his will for me is, but I have faith, I have faith, that the path will be illuminated before me as I need it to be. For even through this searing pain, I am at peace. For I am born again in the eyes in the Lord. And I wanted to thank you for playing your part.
God Made Me Do It
In the final episode of the season, after Boyd and his disciples destroy a meth-lab, not knowing that an undercover police officer was inside, Art practically throws the Bible at him, yelling, “Show me one statement in here that justifies the taking of innocent lives!” Although he’s a Christian, Art knows the difference between justification in a legal setting and faith in a Biblical one. The former has to be conditioned by evidence and logic: the latter merely by personal conviction.
Boyd’s appeal to the word of God is, in Art’s more rational Christianity, an appeal to a printed book, a collection of metaphors and aphorisms that, while they might help to soothe the soul, can’t in any direct way determine actions or, in this particular case, justify murder. Boyd did not know that a police informant was inside the trailer when he blew it up. But that only serves to make his constant appeals to divine will all the more troubling. To say “God made me do it” amounts in the rational perspective pretty much to saying “I didn’t know he was in there.” Both, in other words, are simply excuses.
What’s a stake then is more than just the sincerity of Boyd’s conversion—though that is certainly a matter of some importance. Like Raylan, Boyd believes in the power of his own convictions and in the uptake of those who, for instance, witness his own declarations of faith and conversion. In order to be “justified” Boyd must fulfill all the criteria of justification. But in a performative world, justification is an impossible standard. There are, to put the issue another way, too many fathers for Boyd to invoke—and the failure of fatherhood is one of the running themes of the season and the show. So Bo Crowder tells Boyd: “I’ll send Johnny to tell you where the hand of God is going to strike next.” Bo refers to his own threats to Boyd as “Crowder gospel.”
In an early episode, “Long in the Tooth,” Raylan finally finds and almost recaptures Roland Pike, the very fugitive that he and Tommy Bucks were searching for in Nicaragua. Still on the run from the Marshall’s service, Pike has resettled in California as a dentist to the poor even accepting gifts in kind instead of cash for his services. This is a man who believes in the innate justice of human exchange. Whether or not a dish of tamales is worth the price of repaired teeth is beside the point. Like any gift, the goodness of the gesture itself outweighs the value of the object and thus demands some kind of thanks or recompense. But when another customer jeopardizes this system by insulting the receptionist when she reveals that his insurance will not cover his procedure (the system failing in general), Pike snaps, threatening to pull out all of the man’s teeth if he doesn’t behave. Pike, in other words, believes that the value of acts, especially acts of speech, is determined very much by the general good of the system to which they belong. Kindness demands kindness. Injustice demands retribution. There’s no divine authority. Only the authority of the social good.
Yet for any system to remain intact to this extent, the desires and wishes of any individual within it have to be compromised. After fleeing with his secretary-girlfriend Mindy to the Mexican border, Pike admits that when he was working for the mob be believed that he was “not a bad guy”; he was “just working for bad people.” These are, clearly, excuses by which Pike in his own mind exempts himself from the criminality of the social system to which he belonged. But although he comes to realize that he is “capable” of theft and murder, and thus seems to assume responsibility for his actions, he still clings to the idea that he can be redeemed by the sanction of others. He claims that it was God who wanted him to be a dentist. But as he stands in the desert, knowing that any second he will be shot by a sniper, he declares: “I love you, Mindy”—searching for the reciprocity of his own faithful congregation. Like Boyd, Roland Pike clings to the idea that someone will validate him and his actions so that he will not have to. The alternative, as he somewhat mysteriously says to Raylan, is “nothing.”
A Thin Line
Justified presents the line between justification and excuse as blurred and uncertain. Neither claiming full responsibility for our actions on the assumption of their moral integrity nor deferring responsibility onto accidents, emotions, injustice, or the authority of other powers is in itself sufficient to comprise the basis for moral or legal judgments as to people’s culpability.
“He pulled first” is never an adequate claim, but neither is any excuse since all excuses seek to escape responsibility for our actions. Justified, like Austin’s philosophy, helps us understand the complexity and fragility of our judgments about personal responsibility.