Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 7

Photo by Sacha T'Sas on Unsplash

 
Apparently I actually covered a substantial portion of Chapter 7 in the previous post, and it was already only a bit over 13 minutes of audiobook, so this is going to be a short one. 

The rest of the chapter is just Dresden driving home and thinking about his backstory with Morgan, the White Council, and his old mentor Justin DuMorne, who at this point I think still hasn't been named. 

Do you know, the way Dresden lays it out here, especially in light of additional details we get in Ghost Story, the Doom of Damocles actually seems like a pretty reasonable choice, legally speaking. I'm opposed to punitive justice in general, incarceration, and especially the death penalty, so my discussion here is solely on the legal argument, not the moral one. Dresden killed DuMorne, and they had literally only his word that it was in self-defense. A third party, Elaine, was also thought to have died in the resulting fire, and we're never told how her "death" fit into the proceedings. We've got one dead warlock, whom the White Council was thitherto unwilling or unable to bring in, one apparently dead apprentice, and the other obviously traumatized apprentice who admits to killing them (or at least DuMorne), and says he was protecting himself. Honestly, if DuMorne hadn't been a known bad guy, I think they would have killed Dresden on the spot, and it wouldn't surprise me if Dresden's status as a Starborn and McCoy's grandson played more of a role in the decision to risk keeping him alive than any self-defense argument. 

And that's the other thing. It wasn't actually self-defense. Not by any standard that would hold up in a mortal court of law. Not unless there's something big that we still don't know about what happened after Harry ran away. He went back to the house. He didn't have to. As far as we know, he ran away, he fought He Who Walks Behind, he decided he needed to take out DuMorne, he went to the Leanansidhe for help getting strong enough to do it, and then he went back to challenge DuMorne, and he killed him. That is, by any conventional legal standard, premeditated murder. He thought Elaine had turned against him voluntarily, so he didn't have the dubious defense of trying to rescue her. It was reasonably clear that DuMorne wasn't going to stop coming after him, and Dresden didn't know about the White Council, but he had access to Lea, and he could have made a deal with her for protection, rather than for the power to defeat DuMorne. I don't know how much of that background the Council had, and their definition of self-defense may well include "he was going to keep magically attacking me from a distance unless I stopped him", but the whole thing look's sketchy as hell, and I honestly can't fault Morgan or the Council for continuing to be suspicious at this point in the story.