Khomeini and Criminal Justice: Notes on Crime and Culture

Abstract

It requires little imagination to insert a character from the old American Wild West into the imagery of Khomeini's justice, with the exception that this hero would ride into town with a gun instead of pen and ink, and would do his own enforcing. The simplicity and clarity of justice in both images surely tempts the romantics among us. The essential difference between the folklore figure and the Ayatollah Khomeimi, however, is that the western hero depicts the uneducated, raw man of the frontier, bringing an innocence, a freshness to the uncivilized society of the Wild West. He represents, really, a kind of justice-a highly optimistic and benign view of man's nature, yet a nature without God. Khomeini, on the other hand, depicts the opposite: a highly educated man, a man who stands for 1,380 years (or thereabouts) of learning, who represents not human justice, but divine justice. In Khomeini's view, Iranian society is decivilized rather than uncivilized. His people have been corrupted by the wrong laws and values of the United States, whereas those folks in the Wild West had simply been separated from their laws--a situation of no law, rather than the wrong law. How is it that two vastly different roles produce strikingly similar