When I read your title, I thought you would say that you didn’t want to be Robinson because, in short, he’s a miserable asshole—or at least, that’s my read on Robinson.

And maybe that idea’s somewhere in your essay. But my broader understanding of your point is that the criminal justice system has a problem: When a person does a thing that that one might call, in the word’s least technical sense, a wrong thing, at the same time, the person has a world of reasons for doing the wrong thing that one might call, in the word’s least technical sense, good reasons. This touches, in my mind, the distinction Eben laid out in class between loving justice and hating injustice.

Myself, I love justice more than I hate injustice—or at least, I enjoy loving justice more than I enjoy hating justice. What follows is that I would rather try work some good than try to remedy some wrong. It might be overstating the game therefore, but I think—sitting here now and thinking—that it also follows that, at the Tsarnaev trial, I’d rather be seated in the judge’s chair or the jury box than seated as counsel for the defense. And society needs all three, just as it needs the prosecutors. Maybe, then, it’s less about fusing the split and more about understanding the fault lines.

In any case, I think your essay tees up the thought nicely. Thanks for that.