Two Sides of Dershowitz’s Mouth

Harvard legal scholar Alan Dershowitz has amassed for himself a formidable reputation as a pronouncer of learned views on legal matters, but his reputation for objectivity may not hold up so well under scrutiny.

He recently declaimed, as he seems to roughly annually, on the unlikelihood of Israeli atomic spy Jonathan Pollard’s being able to repeat his crime if he is released from the life sentence he is currently serving for his crime. This hard-to-counter observation, he then deftly converts into an argument for Pollard’s release from prison.

As for other persons accused of crimes—that were not crimes in the places and at the times they were allegedly committed—say, a putative guard at a German concentration camp such as John Demjanjuk—Dershowitz displays no interest in the accused’s ability to revisit his crimes upon a defenseless world. At the time Dershowitz lamented the portions of John Demjanjuk’s life that he did not spend in jail for a “crime” in which he neither killed nor hurt anyone, Demjanjuk was 92 years old, and in possession of no capacity whatsoever to take part in any “Holocaust” real or imagined. But no mercy from the eminent oracle of justice for any person so charged, regardless of the quality of the evidence or the antiquity of the offenses.

This was first published on our Blog on August 4, 2013