I saw this last Sunday on 60 Minutes, and it should be of concern to anyone who cares even just a little bit about justice. Oh I know, a lot of the victims here are criminals. If they didn’t do this, they did something else, or so the thinking goes.

It’s a nice conceit that we’re different from ‘criminals,’ and that they deserve what they got. In some cases it’s even true. Yesterday Aaron Hernandez, the former Patriots tight end committed suicide at the Souza-Baranowski maximum security facility in Massachusetts. And really, I don’t care. Good riddance I thought. This is a guy who shot his former best friend in the eye — miracle of miracles the guy survived to testify against Hernandez in another murder trial — and later he shot two guys in a drive-by because one of them spilled a drink (by all accounts accidentally) on him in a club. Right after he signed a $34 million contract for four years with the Patriots.

So Aaron Hernandez is not like the rest of us, in almost any way. But oh so many so-called ‘criminals’ are. They may be a little less educated, a little more desperate, a little more inured to the violence all around them. But they don’t deserve this form of ‘justice’ depicted here.