This isn't new. It's Robin Hood with torture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that phrase was the way the concept was sold to producers, like Panic in Needle Park was sold as "Romeo & Juliet on heroin".

Death Note is a Japanese anime series, recently come to the US, about a young man who discovers a book that commands a creature that only he can see. If he writes the name of a person in the book, that person dies of a heart attack. He uses his knowledge of the criminal community, which he gets through his police officer father, to kill only people who are evil but beyond the reach of the justice system. However, a detective with preternatural instincts understands he has a vigilante on his hands, and even knows instinctively who it is, but doesn't know how it's done, so he stalks the killer but uses the law to wage psychological war on the killer.

Even older, Boondock Saints is a black comedy about two working-class brothers who stumble into some criminals and kill them. After being celebrated as heroes, they decide God has picked them to continue to kill bad guys who the justice system hasn't been able to stop. It's a bloody, exciting and (in its way) funny movie, but chilling, especially at the end, when one realizes that the system of vigilante justice begun by our bumbling antiheroes will continue to circumvent, and eventually gut our justice system by nullifying legal proof of guilt and jury verdict in the most violent way possible.

Both of these can provoke reflection on and discussion of the nature of justice and vigilantism, the meaning of the rule of law, and America's own history of frontier justice.

I haven't seen Dexter. I don't especially want to, having visited the official website to see what this discussion is all about, but it's not because of the concept of someone seeking to enforce his personal idea of justice. That story is old, very old, because civil justice, injustice, crime and vigilantism have been with us for as long as we have had civilization. The stories are ways into a discussion of these real problems, without having to have a first-person experience of life in a vigilante society. And in order to avoid having that kind of society, driven by self-righteous attitudes and revenge, we must talk about what justice is, why it's valuable, and how we want to maintain it. It's a social contract; it must be understood and reagreed to regularly.

The reason I don't want to buy into Dexter as a vehicle to this discussion is because torture is absolutely disgusting for any reason, let alone to use in pursuit of justice, which is the premise of the series. The principle character gratifies his need to inflict pain by picking people who "deserve" it. But perhaps, with our elected officials making a case for using torture as an instrument of "justice", to assuage the fear that they themselves feed by their cynical manipulation of public panic for political purposes, this really is something we need to talk about. Do we want to have our Justice Department employing Dexter out in the open, to do what he does with official sanction?