Marcus Rodriguez is dead. Before his body was cold, thousands of people online were celebrating. They called his killer a "hero," a "digital guardian," a "necessary evil." They are wrong. Dangerously, catastrophically wrong.
Let us be absolutely clear about what happened: A human being was killed in his own home by someone who appointed himself judge, jury, and executioner. There was no trial. No defense. No appeal. Just death, delivered by a coward hiding behind a computer screen.
This is not justice. This is murder. And every person who celebrates it is complicit in the destruction of the very foundations of civilized society.
The Seductive Lie
We understand the appeal. Rodriguez was not a good man. He was almost certainly involved in criminal enterprises. The system failed to stop him. Isn't it satisfying, on some primal level, to see bad people get what's coming to them?
Yes. It is satisfying. That satisfaction is exactly the problem.
Throughout history, every authoritarian movement has begun with the seductive promise of swift justice against people everyone agreed were bad. "We'll only target the criminals," they promised. "We'll only go after the corrupt." And desperate people, tired of watching the guilty go free, embraced that promise.
They always regretted it.
"First they came for the criminals, and I did not speak out β because I was not a criminal. But when they came for me, there was no one left to speak."
β Adapted from Martin NiemΓΆller
Who Decides?
Here is the question that TerrorByte's defenders cannot answer: Who gave him the right?
Who decided Marcus Rodriguez deserved to die? TerrorByte did β alone, in secret, accountable to no one. Who verified the evidence? TerrorByte did. Who ensured there were no mitigating circumstances, no possibility of error? No one.
Today, TerrorByte killed someone most people agree was a criminal. Tomorrow, who will he kill? Someone accused of corruption? Someone who said something he didn't like online? Someone who looked at him wrong?
When you give one person the power of life and death with no oversight, no accountability, no checks on their judgment, you have not created a hero. You have created a tyrant. The only difference between TerrorByte and the dictators we read about in history books is scale β and that can change very quickly.
The System We're Destroying
Yes, our justice system is imperfect. Yes, the wealthy and powerful too often escape consequences. Yes, reform is desperately needed.
But the answer to an imperfect system is not to abandon systems entirely. The answer is not to hand power to anonymous killers who answer to no one. The answer is the hard, frustrating, incremental work of making our institutions better.
Every time we celebrate TerrorByte, we make that work harder. We tell our fellow citizens that the rule of law is a joke, that might makes right, that whoever has the most power gets to decide who lives and dies.
Is that really the world we want to live in?
A Choice
Metro City faces a choice. We can surrender to the seductive fantasy of the vigilante β the lone hero who cuts through bureaucracy and delivers instant justice. Or we can do the hard work of building institutions worthy of our trust.
One path leads to a society where anyone with enough power can kill with impunity, where fear replaces law, where we are all potential targets of whoever happens to be holding the weapon today.
The other path is harder. It requires patience. It requires faith that even an imperfect system can be improved. It requires us to accept that sometimes guilty people will go free, because the alternative β a world without due process β is far worse.
TerrorByte wants us to believe there's a shortcut to justice. There isn't. There never has been. And the sooner we stop pretending otherwise, the sooner we can start building something better.
Marcus Rodriguez is dead. Maybe he deserved it. Maybe he didn't. We'll never know, because he never got a trial. And that should terrify every single one of us.
This editorial represents the unanimous view of the Metro Daily Editorial Board.