All it takes is a flicker of eye contact and a gun battle duet -- the two fastest guns in town shooting a murderer side by side at the same split second.
But two factions — the state-sponsored torturers and murderers on one side, and criminal gangs, known as the vory, on the other — have no interest in either delivering or receiving a mea culpa.
"What is needed," said Ms. Cocco, the aid worker, "is an independent tribunal that will punish ethnic murderers on both sides.
Liverpool isn't the only team with a murderer on its side.
Ever since the nice motor vehicle man (my friend's cousin) passed me the sixth time around and I finally got my license, I've thrilled to the feel of the engine under my foot, the wind in what's left of my hair, and the freedom to go wherever I want without fearing the Uber driver may be an axe murderer on the side.
Yet blasphemy is such an emotive subject in Pakistan that the day after such a high-profile murder, many seemed to side with the murderer, possibly for fear of being accused themselves.
"Let a man," he wrote, "who is being pursued by his intending murderers, dart into a side street, return immediately, and advance with perfect calmness toward his pursuers, or let him mix with them and seem intent on the case, and he will certainly make himself invisible".
Where, Turow asked himself, was the shining principle in such dichotomies, the line which put Hernandez or another scared kid of a client, Chris Thomas, one one side and murderers like Sanchez or John Wayne Gacy, serial slaughterer of 33 young boys, on the other?
We are unwittingly about to join a "dirty war" in Basilan, siding with murderers and torturers in a way that dishonors our larger purposes.
I ate many a meal with a murderer sitting on either side of me.
