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I very randomly watched A Time to Kill, a now mostly forgotten film that had some super-hot takes on the culture war back when it came out in 1996. Overall, I liked it a lot and thought it threw out some genuinely interesting moral considerations, but I also found the tone and message... wonky.
The premise - In the Deep South of Alabama (presumably in 1996), two drunk red neck good old boys who liberally say "nigger" and have a Confederate flag on their truck are trawling around town harassing random people. On a whim, they kidnap, rape, torture, and try to murder a 10 year old black girl. She survives, but is left with lots of injuries, including being unable to ever have children.
The rednecks are quickly arrested and everyone in town hopes they'll receive swift justice, but some people aren't so sure they will. Alabama is still considered deeply racist, and apparently a similar case a few years ago saw different perpetrators escape punishment. So the father (Samuel L. Jackson) takes matters into his own hands. While the two suspects are being marched through the local court house on the way to their trial, the father guns them down with an assault rifle, and accidentally wounds a police officer in the process.
The rest of the movie is a courtroom drama where a white lawyer (Matthew McConaughey) defends the father while the local DA (Kevin Spacey) tries to charge him with double first-degree murder. Meanwhile, the brother of one of the suspects tries to get the literal KKK to terrorize the lawyer to sabotage the defense. He's told that there is no KKK in town, but through some contacts, the brother finds the nearest Grand Wizard who then commands the brother to set up a local chapter. Throughout the trial, the KKK launches various terrorist attacks on the town and amasses 100+ members to march through the streets, and gets into violent encounters with pro-father protesters.
To get to the most interesting culture war-y part, I need to SPOIL the plot, so don't read on if you don't want to know what happens in a 25 year old movie.
The Defense mostly fucks up in the trial and it looks like the father is going to be convicted. The biggest problem for the Defense is that the jury is all white and presumed to be racist/unsympathetic. In one scene, the jurors are shown talking about the trial (illegally) the night before its conclusion, and all 12 jurors admit that they will vote guilty (one of whom even refers to the defendant as a "nigger").
Cut to the climactic closing statements of the trial. The DA gives a rousing speech about how he feels sorry for the father given what his daughter went through, but the law is the law, and you can't just murder two men in cold blood because they wronged you. Then McConaughey gives his closing statement: he recounts in gruesome detail every step of the 10 year old girl's kidnapping, torture, and rape, and concludes with... "now imagine if she was white."
The Defense wins the trial. The father is cleared of all charges and goes free. The film's narrative portrays this as an unambiguously good thing.
There's a lot to unpack here, but a few prompts:
Was 1996 Alabama really THAT racist? Would the random average white person in Alabama at that time be considered racist enough by default that they would automatically side against any black defendant? Were there enough real, true, hardcore racists that the KKK could field 100+ protesters at a big racial trial?
How differently, if at all, would such a trial be perceived today?
What is a proper punishment for the father, if any? If I had to give a verdict, I'd say he should be found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison, which is an extremely short sentence for a double murder and maiming of a cop, but warranted given the context. I most certainly wouldn't be comfortable with finding him not guilty, not if we want to have a functional society.
Non-culture war addendum - the movie has an insane amount of contemporary and future movie stars. There's Matthew McConaughey, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Spacey, Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd, Donald Sutherland, Kiefer Sutherland, Kurtwood Smith, Oliver Platt, Chris Cooper, Charles Dutton, and I'm proud of myself for spotting Octavia Spencer as a literal extra.
My own addendum
3.5: How does your answer change based on the fact that the vigilantism happened before the men were tried?
Having not seen the movie and just going on your description, I think I would be somewhat harsh on the father because he didn't even give the justice system a chance. If the men had been tried, found not guilty or gotten away with a slap on the wrist, and then the father killed them, I'd be inclined to give a similar punishment of ~10 years. Similarly if the police had failed to arrest them in the first place. I'd think that the father did the right thing morally in killing them, but that the law needs to be enforced and have consequences, and he can do his time in exchange for having his morally justified revenge.
But he didn't even let them get to trial. And, given that the all white and kind of racist jury did in fact find him not guilty, this implies that they would have been even more likely to find the original criminals guilty if he had let them (technically it would probably be a different jury, but in the same area statistically it would have the same representation).
I think vigilantism after the justice system has already failed you is much more defensible than vigilantism in anticipation of the justice system failing, unless there is a clear and repeated pattern such that you reliably know it will fail, which a single prior case does not establish. The father should get a fairly harsh sentence. Still less than an unprovoked double homicide would warrant, but quite a bit more than I would think fair for a vigilante attack when the perpetrators were not literally in police custody.
I would take the opposite view.
If the justice system has found a person not guilty, that person must be entitled to the full protection of the criminal law. We can't allow vigilantes who disagree with juries to take matters into their own hands and go after people our justice system is unable to prove actually committed an offence.
To do the opposite would impliedly be saying: "despite or because of all our criminal procedure rules and constitutional protections designed to ensure consistency and fairness, we have been unable to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this person guilty. Nonetheless, we'll look the other way if different judge decides they probably were guilty anyway".
By what process could this second judge make the decision? Would they hear representations from advocates in advance and declare people found not guilty to be outlaws? Or retry the original allegations a second time as a trial within a trial once vigilante justice has been done, but without the testimony of the newly deceased? And by what evidential standard should this judgement be made? If 12 disinterested strangers were not sure beyond a reasonable doubt that a person was guilty, how sure must a judge be to declare them an outlaw after their deaths?
However disgusted we may be when our justice system lets a guilty man walk, we must remember that it was set up in this way on purpose: "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer".
I think the most forceful justification for Blackstone's ratio came from John Adams while defending British soldiers charged with murder for their role in the Boston Massacre:
"We find, in the rules laid down by the greatest English Judges, who have been the brightest of mankind; We are to look upon it as more beneficial, that many guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent person should suffer. The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in the world, that all of them cannot be punished; and many times they happen in such a manner, that it is not of much consequence to the public, whether they are punished or not. But when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, it is immaterial to me, whether I behave well or ill; for virtue itself, is no security. And if such a sentiment as this, should take place in the mind of the subject, there would be an end to all security what so ever."
To be clear, my stance only applies when (a subcomponent of) the justice system is clearly and obviously corrupt. If you have a corrupt local judge/jury that can simply try murderers and declare them not guilty, which with double jeopardy makes them not guilty permanently, then what you have is worse than there literally being no local justice system, because it actively protects murderers from higher courts. I don't think prosecutors have an appeal process to higher courts when they get an unjust "not-guilty" unless there's some clear explicit corruption beyond "hopelessly racist jury".
Now, obviously there are better solutions to the detecting and ousting of corrupt local courts than just allowing vigilantism. But, conditional on someone finding themself in a situation in which the courts are clearly and obviously corrupt and the higher courts have not yet noticed or cared enough to fix the issue, then vigilantism might be the trigger needed to make them care. And, if the higher court finds that "whoops, this guy was obviously guilty, the court was negligent in finding them not guilty, and we should have stopped this corruption a long time ago, sorry", then it would be appropriate to lessen the sentence of the vigilante.
The four major goals of punishment are
1: retribution
2:rehabilitation
3:deterrence
4: incapacitation
Conditional on the higher courts finding that the victims were clearly and obviously guilty and only got free due to corruption, most of these goals don't apply to the vigilante. Retribution is less necessary because the victims, being murderous scum, deserved what they got and don't need to avenged. Rehabilitation isn't especially necessary because the vigilante is not broken or morally corrupt, they know right from wrong and only acted in violence against murderous scum. Similarly, incapacitation is entirely unnecessary: they are not at risk of re-offending unless someone else decides to kidnap and rape their daughter.
Deterrence could go either way depending on how far you generalize the behavior and the obviousness of the injustice the vigilante is fixing. We want to deter wannabe heroes who take the law into their own hands after they don't get their way in a fair trial. But I contend that vigilantism is a just and beneficial response in a corrupt system. First, imagine an oppressive regime in some foreign dictatorship rather than the American justice system, I would think it clear that if the law does not protect you then protecting yourself is better than simply bowing and being oppressed. Then imagine small pockets in America where the American justice system is secretly replaced by courts run by the evil dictatorship. Therefore, deterring vigilantism in that tiny subset of scenarios is actively bad, because it's very important to deter real criminals, and it's better that vigilantes deter them than literally no one. Vigilantism is bad only in healthy societies where the police are already fulfilling the role of deterring criminals to the point that adding vigilantes has diminishing returns and creates too many false positives to be worth it.
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That was probably a fantastic rule for a country of 3 million devoutly religious English farmers. Whether it's a good rule at all times and all places is up for debate. El Salvador was recently pulled back from the brink of anarchy by discarding that rule and throwing the trouble makers in jail permanently and millions of people can now go about their lives without being terrorized by criminal gangs.
Blackstone's maxim was that it's better that ten guilty escape rather than one innocent suffer, not 100 guilty. I don't think it has much to do with El Salvador; it wasn't overly stringent standards in criminal trials resulting in gang members running free.
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