Executive orders - Tom Clancy [295]
I figure you picked tough ones, Pat. Did you pick fair ones? the President asked.
Remember what I said a minute ago? I don't want this sort of power? I didn't dare do otherwise. E here reversed a conviction one of my best people got on a technicality-an issue of admissibility-and when he did it, we were all pretty mad. The issue was entrapment, where the line is. The defendant was guilty as hell, no doubt of it. But Judge E looked at the arguments and probably made the right call, and that ruling is part of FBI guidelines now.
Jack looked at the folders. It would be a full week's reading. This, as Arnie had told him a few days before, would be his most important act as President. No Chief Executive since Washington had been faced with the necessity of appointing the entire Supreme Court, and even that had been in an age when the national consensus on law had been far firmer and deeper than what existed in America now. Back then cruel and unusual punishment had meant the rack and burning at the stake-both of those things that had been used in pre-Revolutionary America-but in more recent rulings had been taken to mean the absence of cable television and denial of sex-change operations, or just overcrowding in the prisons. So fine, Ryan thought, the prisons are too crowded, and then why not release dangerous criminals on society for fear of being cruel to convicted felons?
Now he had the power to change that. All he had to do was select judges who took as harsh a view on crime as he did, an outlook he'd learned from listening to his father's occasional rant about a particularly vile crime, or an especially bat-brained judge who hadn't ever viewed a crime scene, and therefore never really known what the issues were. And for Ryan there was the personal element. He'd been the subject of attempted murder, as had his wife and children. He knew what it was all about, the outrage at facing the fact that there were people who could take a life as easily as buying candy at a drug store, who preyed on others as though they were game animals, and whose actions cried out for retribution. He could remember looking into Sean Miller's eyes more than once and seeing nothing, nothing in there at all. No humanity, no empathy, no feelings-not even hatred, so outside the human community he'd taken himself that there was no returning
And yet.
Ryan closed his eyes, remembering the moment, a loaded Browning pistol in his grip, his blood boiling in his veins but his hands like ice, the exquisite moment at which he could have ended the life of the man who had so wanted to end his own-and Cathy's, and Sally's, and Little Jack, yet unborn. Looking in his eyes, and finally seeing the fear at last, breaking through the shell of inhumanity but how many times had he thanked a merciful God that he'd neglected to cock the hammer on his pistol? He would have done it. He'd wanted to do it more than anything in his life, and he could remember pulling the trigger, only to be surprised when it hadn't moved-and then the moment had passed away. Jack could remember killing. The terrorist in London. The one in the boat at the base of his cliff. The cook on the submarine. Surely he'd killed others-that horrible night in Colombia which had given him nightmares for years after. But Sean Miller was different. It hadn't been necessity for Miller. For him it had been justice of a sort, and he'd been there, and he'd