Abstract
I. Prologue: Dirty Harry, 1977 I didn't see Dirty Harry until my freshman year in college, in 1977, at a $ 1 Midnight Madness showing at the university center. But it was a memorable event: a rowdy, college audience cheering as one for the quintessential 1970s anti-hero hero, hard-bitten Inspector Harry Callaghan of the San Francisco Police Department, played by the squinting Clint Eastwood, as he did battle with a truly evil serial killer/child-kidnapper - and with the upside-down, criminal-coddling legal system that freed this monster to kill and terrorize more victims. It would be dramatizing to say that this flick led me to law school (and to my brief stint as a federal prosecutor), but one scene does remain blazed in my memory twenty years later. Inspector Callaghan - "Dirty Harry" - has agreed to carry the ran- som to the kidnapper/killer/terrorist (known as "Scorpio") that the softheads in the Department have decided to pay off. Harry believes that Scorpio intends to kill his child kidnap victim anyway (if he hasn't done so already). Harry grudgingly makes the delivery, the deal goes down, but Scorpio decides to kill Harry off, too. Harry barely escapes, managing to wound Scorpio severely with a switchblade to the leg. With time running out - the killer's ransom demand said that the fourteen-year-old girl was buried alive, with oxygen enough only until 3 A.M. - Harry tracks Scorpio to a hospital and eventually to the football stadium basement where Scorpio lives. Harry scales the ...