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An Early Report on "Minority
Report"
by Paul Bergman
Minority Report is a Steven Spielberg film based on
a story by Phillip K. Dick. It is scheduled for release about
10 days after I write this brief analysis. I attended a studio
screening to which a number of law professors were invited.
 The
story is a futuristic thriller set in Washington, D.C. in the
mid-21st century. The basic concept is that three people called
"Pre-Cogs" have the ability to predict murder. Based
on the Pre-Cogs' unerring accuracy, D.C. has enacted preventive
detention laws that allow officials to arrest people before they
can commit crimes and hold them indefinitely in a kind of animated
suspension. Tom Cruise portrays the official who interprets the
Pre-Cogs' visual images and tries to locate and arrest the murderers
before crimes can take place. The program has been extremely
successful -- D.C. has gone years without a murder. In fact,
the country is soon to vote on an initiative that would extend
the program nationwide.
Without giving away too much
of the story, I can say that even those who are vaguely familiar
with the films of Alfred Hitchcock will recognize that Minority
Report pays homage to one of his most familiar themes, the
"innocent man on the run." (Fans of Hitchcock's Spellbound
will especially appreciate Minority Report's conclusion.)
Like a Hitchcock film, Minority Report has nice touches
of humor, especially when the action moves to a shopping center
in which all the stores know customers' purchase history. Many
sequences are visually compelling, particularly the sequences
in which Cruise orchestrates the Pre-Cogs' images in an effort
to understand their message. The music, by John Williams, is
often soaring. The ultra-squeamish should be advised, however,
that the film does contain a short bit of gore.
Minority Report raises interesting questions about
some fundamental criminal law issues. United States criminal
law policy has always been to punish people who do (or attempt
to do) evil deeds, not people who think evil thoughts or even
plan evil deeds, so long as those deeds stay strictly in the
planning realm. In part, this policy is based on a sense that
all of us think evil thoughts at one time or another, and we
have no way of predicting whose thoughts will become concrete
deeds. But what if we could know ahead of time, with certainty,
the identities of those who will shortly kill? Isn't it preferable
to prevent harm than to punish after harm has taken place? Why
would we have to be 100% certain of accuracy before permitting
preventive detention, when we permit executions based on "beyond
a reasonable doubt"? On the other hand, once a killing is
prevented, is it necessary to lock a person away forever? Studies
suggest that many killings are done in the heat of a moment;
once that moment passes, couldn't many people be trusted not
to kill?
Questions such as these are
not merely academic. Following the killing spree by two teenagers
at Columbine High School in Colorado, other children were arrested
based on plans to commit violence that they had revealed to others
or written about in private diaries. In California and other
states, sex offenders can be kept in prison indefinitely, even
after their sentences expire, based on expert opinions that the
offenders remain a threat to repeat their acts. In the months
following the Sept. 11, 2001 tragedy at the World Trade Center,
a number of Muslims have been detained based on evidence that
they planned to do evil. And in garden-variety personal conflicts,
judges often issue "restraining orders" to try to prevent
one person from harming another.
In none of these situations,
admittedly, has the information leading to detention or other
restrictions on freedom been provided by fortune-tellers. However,
popular confidence in the conclusions of "hard scientists"
is probably lower, and popular confidence in psychic predictions
is probably higher, than many of us would like to believe. By
mid-century, who is to say that scientists won't be able to provide
predictions that are solid enough for us as a society to accept
preventive detention?
Posted: July 5, 2002
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