Frontier Justice

[Cornfed]

This is what had to happen when you stepped out of line sometimes. The justice was administered mostly on and by a certain ethnic group. I could go on about that, but for now here is this.

[Winston]

What movie is this from? Theres a lot of big names there. Why did they hang him without a trial? Isn't that illegal? Don't they deserve a court trial by jury? Is the sheriff among the group?

[Cornfed]

What movie is this from? Theres a lot of big names there. Why did they hang him without a trial? Isn't that illegal? Don't they deserve a court trial by jury? Is the sheriff among the group?

This is from the mini-series Lonesome Dove. In English law a trial would require them to be within the jurisdiction of a settled population rather than in the wild. At that time and place they had to do the best they could, which in this case was to rely on the old traditions of the English-Scottish border region, which is why we have the seemingly strange tradition of calling wilderness areas “the frontier”.

[Cornfed]

Just to note, the second guy who was hanged was particularly well cast from an ethnic perspective. It is not that he looks exactly like me, but we look as a type. We are clearly our own separate ethnic group.

[flowerthief00]

Hey, don't give away the most memorable scene.
And they did a fine job adapting the series from the book.

[Winston]

But the last guy hanged played by robert urich, said he never killed anyone. Only the gang he rode with did. So he was only guilty by association. So it may have been wrong to hang him. Especially since the guys hanging him were his friends. What time period does this series take place in?

Some of the scum in washington DC deserve to be hanged like that though.

[Cornfed]

But the last guy hanged played by robert urich, said he never killed anyone. Only the gang he rode with did. So he was only guilty by association. So it may have been wrong to hang him. Especially since the guys hanging him were his friends. What time period does this series take place in?

Well like Gus said, the guy rode with outlaws who were killing people, and if you do that for long enough then under our tradition you become one of them, regardless of whether you kill people yourself. Having said that, it did kind of stick in my throat that Gus got to make that decision when there was bad blood between the characters. I think it was a flaw in the writing. The series would have happened in the historical time of the 1870s or 1880s.

[Winston]

If it was in the 1870s then there would have been Constitutional rights at the time, so he would have been entitled to a fair trial by jury right?

I don't think it's right to execute someone in a gang just because other gang members killed people. If he didn't kill anyone he should just be imprisoned, but not executed. Capital punishment shouldn't work like that. That show doesn't seem just.

[Cornfed]

If it was in the 1870s then there would have been Constitutional rights at the time, so he would have been entitled to a fair trial by jury right?

In theory yes, but in practise no. Winston, you don't have a clue about Western history.

[Cornfed]

If it was in the 1870s then there would have been Constitutional rights at the time, so he would have been entitled to a fair trial by jury right?

I don't think it's right to execute someone in a gang just because other gang members killed people. If he didn't kill anyone he should just be imprisoned, but not executed.

That’s your opinion as a Westernised Chinese person living in the modern era. Those people were doing the best they could with what they had, which was operating on old English-Scottish traditions, and though it may seem harsh it worked out pretty well.