It made perfect sense to kill on sight Osama bin Laden. It was also perfectly wrong. Mistaken because we as Americans, heirs of the European Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment, decided last century that all accused men deserve a fair trial before execution. We staged trials for even the Nazis, but not because they earned it. Instead we did so in the name of Rule of Law, our common humanity, and to illuminate the dangers of ideological fanaticism. We use the legal sciences and forensic arts to give depravity its proper place within the larger story of history, making sense of it, drawing out lessons which cannot be gleaned any other way.
