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Michael Cianchette is a Navy reservist who served in Afghanistan. He is in-house counsel to a number of businesses in southern Maine and was a chief counsel to former Gov. Paul LePage.
People knew.
That’s the theme from some of the headline-grabbing violence — real or attempted — over the past year.
The Independent Commission to Investigate the Facts of the Tragedy in Lewiston found that many people — most notably Army Reserve personnel and the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office — knew Robert Card II was dangerous. The threat of a “mass shooting” was mentioned by name.
In other words, people knew.
The Georgia school shooter was a 14-year old who had been visited by the FBI in May 2023 about online threats of violence. Weeks before the attack, the shooter’s aunt and grandmother reported he was having suicidal and homicidal thoughts. And the morning of the tragedy, his mother called the school and said her son was having an “extreme emergency.”
In other words, people knew.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s newest would-be assassin was reported to Customs and Border Patrol by Americans returning from Ukraine. He was called “predatory,” “antisocial,” and a “whack job.” A convicted felon, he was reported to the FBI in 2019 as illegally possessing firearms. The tip was passed to Hawaiian law enforcement — where the shooter lived at the time — and apparently never checked out.
In other words, people knew.
Hindsight is always 20/20. There are likely countless reports of deranged individuals that never result in headline-grabbing tragedies. But the small number that do shine a light on what could have been if only authorities, who knew, did more.
It raises a much bigger question. It was put to me in high school. Which is worse: a guilty person going free or incarcerating an innocent person?
It is a pointed way to get at core principles. Is freedom or security the greater good?
Back then, I said letting the guilty free was worse. My thinking was that a guilty person — let’s say a murderer — remained a threat to the public at large if they were free. An innocent person in prison is bad, but the negative effects on society are less than a murderer on the loose. Or so I thought.
As I got older, I became more skeptical. Blackstone’s ratio — named for famed English jurist William Blackstone — became a foundation of our legal system. He suggested that it was better for 10 criminals to go free than it was for one innocent to be convicted. It was echoed by Founders like Benjamin Franklin and John Adams.
None of this excuses the failures of authorities faced with advance warnings about deranged, violent individuals. There is no good in letting crimes happen when you can intercede to prevent them.
Yet it highlights where our efforts might do the most good while still holding fast to our foundational principles. An indiscriminate security apparatus empowered by sweeping laws, collecting criminals with some innocent bycatch, might have been more effective at preventing these real and near-tragedies.
However, Americans place a higher value on freedom. We rightly fault our system when it sends innocents to jail; it is not a mere cost of doing business, but something detestable.
With respect to the recent headlines, all three perpetrators were clearly not well. People knew.
Existing laws governed their ability to possess firearms, either prospectively or through court processes. Mental health treatment was almost certainly in order for each of them. Well-adjusted people don’t try to murder others.
People knew.
Law enforcement faces a herculean task filtering which tips they get are real and which are likely to go nowhere. Yet resourcing them appropriately — funding the police — is critical to executing our existing laws.
And when people know there is a problem, they need to still speak up. Next time it might make a difference.
