To some extent, "Dirty Harry" exposes the tension between our fear of the monsters who live among us and the fear of unchecked power.

It's hard to get concerned with the sanctity of process and the rights of the accused when the person on trial is as odious as the Scorpio or his real-life counterparts.

Some people view crime as the resort of the desperate and the powerless, but the propensity to casual violence is a kind of power in itself, and the people subjected to it have no rights at all, so when the necks of the violent are under the boot of the state, justice demands careful examination of the proof, but other concerns tend to fall by the wayside.

Rights safeguard justice, but there is something we reflexively recognize as unfair in the assertion of rights by someone who has been contemptuous of the rights of others and merciless toward the innocent.

In our stories, the mechanisms of process, even when it is functional, are insufficient to deliver justice upon villains. The circumstance must always arise where even the by-the-book protagonist has to draw down on the bad guy. As a core moral principle, there is a reflexive understanding that some people commit such offensive acts that allowing them to exist affronts the notion of human dignity.

We limit the force that we permit government to wield, because we don't want to bring that hammer down on sad junkies, small-time dealers and penny-ante hoods. But even as we insist upon an evenhanded system to protect the innocent and show proof in public before doling out justice, our fascination with vigilantes and antiheroes, from Dirty Harry to Batman, belies our anxiety that the limitations on official force render that force impotent to protect us against real threats. The fact that the Zodiac killer, the real-life inspiration for Scorpio, got away was a fact that was not lost on the audience.