I listened to a long report on NPR last night about Saddam’s upcoming trial. The gist of the story is that Human Rights lawyers are worried that Saddam can’t get a fair trial and that without one, there can be no justice.

Now, I am all for Saddam getting a fair trial for all sorts of reasons. But I do think it’s worth calling attention to the fact that a fair trial and justice do not always go in tandem. The notion that justice is impossible without procedural fairness is a real distortion of the concept. If Saddam is executed at the end of a sham trial, it will not be unjust to him. Whatever injustice there would be would be to history, to the Iraqi people, to the victims and their families who did not have a legitimate voice in the process.

This is an elemental point we all understand until lawyers and journalists start talking. We do not boo when the villain in a movie meets a terrible fate because he didn’t get a fair trial. We do not weep at the injustice of it all when we hear that a child rapist was shot while committing his crime. “But he didn’t get to tell his side of the story!”

The criminal justice system was created to protect the innocent, not the guilty. If we had some sort of machine or a conduit to God which could, without error, tell us exactly what happened and why in every criminal event, we would never have trials because we would know we had the guilty guy. And, after checking the Oracle 9000 for the pertinent details, we would move straight to sentencing and, if warranted, execution. And justice would be done without hearing a peep from the accused.

All reasonable people understand that Saddam is deserving of whatever fate befalls him. The need for his fair trial is to set the precedent for future trials — in and out of Iraq — where guilt is less certain, and the nature of justice more open to debate.