By Seattle Crime Blog editor & publisher Rob La Gatta

Mob justice:

Early Sunday morning, witnesses say, a crowd of about a dozen people beat a 25-year-old man outside the Chop Suey night club on Capitol Hill after the man was ejected from the club for allegedly harassing a woman.

Angelo—who witnessed the event and did not give his last name—and several of his friends were walking near Chop Suey around 1:30 Sunday morning, when he says a large crowd attacked the man. [...] Angelo claims he saw someone grab a folding chair from Chop Suey and use it to beat the man. Angelo also says no one did anything to help the man, who was left bloodied in the intersection of 14th and Pike.

It begs the question: is mob justice a fitting punishment for socially deplorable behavior? On the one hand, knowing that you're going to get your ass kicked for acting out has been a deterrent to men throughout the ages, and is indeed one of the driving forces that keeps civilized society functioning properly. On the other hand, too often situations are blown out of proportion, particularly when alcohol is involved - which, as this incident took place at Chop Suey late in the evening, I'd suspect was the case. But we're left wondering, did this ass-grabber deserve the ass kicking he received?

Packratt at Injustice in Seattle seems to have an answer, and makes a good point in a recent post:

I suppose that Seattle is so far northwest that it's still backwards and firmly in the old west, where mob rule was the law of the land and if you were strung up on a tree you must have deserved it somehow. The problem is that... sometimes, the angry mob is wrong and the drunken pursuit of justice is easily transformed into an injustice that was worse than the alleged crime.

It's a tricky issue, and one that I can't claim to know the answer to: while I think in theory mob rule can be a valuable system of social checks and balances, it can easily be blown out of proportion to the point where the beating being administered really isn't "justice" at all.