Has Longmire Already Jumped the Shark?

I’m a fan of the television series Longmire from the A&E Network, currently in its second season. It’s a show about a small-town sheriff (Walt Longmire) in a fictional northern Wyoming county. The show has a nice, easy pace, is rich with nuance, has complex characters, and is beautifully photographed. The show often has strong themes of redemption, reconciliation, and forgiveness. Usually the bad guys are not all bad and the good guys are not all good. The characters are so rich and nuanced because the TV series is based on series of novels and the author is intricately involved in the show.

Sheriff Walt Longmire is a quintessential man’s man — a man of few words; principled, yet broken and imperfect. Walt does what he believes to be right even if his beliefs don’t always exactly line up with law-enforcement “best practices.” That’s okay; after all, this is television. The story wouldn’t be too compelling if everyone behaved exactly how they were expected to behave.

This week, however, I'm scratching my head a bit. In the most recent episode The Great Spirit, we discover Sheriff Walt Longmire possesses mad rodeo roping skills. I mean of course he would, right? After all, he lives in Wyoming. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief this far. What makes me wonder if they’ve already jumped the shark is the over-the-top coerced confession Sheriff Walt extracts from the bad guy at the end of the episode.

We’ve all seen coerced confession in procedural police dramas before, and I’m usually willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of the story and the fact that the good guy probably didn’t really mean it in the first place. My gripe here is the degree of coercion.

In the episode, the suspect confesses only after Sheriff Walt lashes the suspect’s legs to a wild horse and threatens to horse-drag him (like the victim had been). The suspect, who was on his front porch, is shown prone, helpless, and holding on for his life; gripping patio furniture and pillars as the horse slowly begins to drag him from his porch, while one of Walt’s deputies makes a show of having difficulty controlling the mare. Throughout this ridiculousness, Sheriff Walt is mocking the suspect and the Constitution; violating (at least) the fourth, fifth, and eighth amendments faster than an eight-second rodeo ride.

This blatant violation of rights does not agree with the character of Walt Longmire as revealed thus far in the show. Certainly he is a private man with his own demons, but he has never by any stretch been an anti-hero.

One can only hope this episode (which was an otherwise fine episode) was an anomaly. New episodes begin on July 29th.

Picking at the scab

To begin, some wisdom from Chad Vegas from this past Saturday to put things in perspective:

I don’t celebrate the not “guilty verdict” of Zimmerman today. If he was truly “not guilty,” then I am thankful some semblance of justice was done. However, I am still grieved today. I am grieved that a family lost a son. I am grieved that this same family must feel a tremendous sense of injustice with their loss. I am grieved that black people were treated so badly in our nation’s past that they rightly question the equality of our justice system. I am grieved above all that sin has entered our world and driven us into both a deep racial divide and into the need for a criminal justice system in the first place.

That being said, Doug Wilson is rightly lamenting the unsurprising and hackneyed aftermath/reaction to the verdict.
Douglas Wilson:

The irony is that Trayvon is now being compared to genuine lynch mob victims, and the comparison is being made by crowds outside the courthouse, away from the evidence presented in a rule-guided setting, but nevertheless demanding the conviction of an individual for political reasons.

Wilson goes on to point out that, in the current political climate, no one even blinks when another court butts in to a case that has already been adjudicated, if the verdict was politically distasteful.

Whenever someone is tried and acquitted, as Zimmerman has been, it is beyond offensive to continue to orchestrate political pressure in order to keep trying him until we find a venue that will give us the “right answer.” Our double jeopardy protections are there for a good reason, and the right of a convicted man to appeal, while restricting the right of a defeated prosecutor to do so, is grounded in biblical law. It is of the highest order of importance that political passions be kept out of the courtroom.

The parties involved in the George Zimmerman / Trayvon Martin case have had their day in court. One can only assume each party gave it their best shot before a jury that reached a unanimous decision. Now the feds want to get into the act.

How can you expect to heal if you keep picking at the scab?