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But Little’s decades of impunity underscore a troubling truth about the U.S. criminal justice system: It is possible to get away with murder if you kill people whose lives are already devalued by society.
The Perfect Victim

This is the sort of “troubling truth” that I, personally, am not troubled by. Not in the sense that I support the idea that law enforcement should be unequal, but because I understand why it is unequal, and being troubled by basic facts of life is bad for one’s mental health.

For all that advocates for poor and minority communities, and other groups commonly referred to as “marginalized,” claim that they don’t want less attention and fewer resources to be devoted to investigating the disappearances and deaths of young, attractive, white, and upper middle class women, maintaining the levels of public interest (and thus, media coverage) and law enforcement engagement for every disappearance and death would require a level of resourcing that I suspect would quickly become unsustainable. Accordingly trade-offs have to be made. And, as with pretty much all trade-offs, those made by the criminal justice system respond to the incentives that are placed before it.

But open talk of trade-offs tends to be avoided. The Washington Post’s choice of words speaks to this in the formulation of: “people whose lives are already devalued by society.” This characterizes “value” as something that starts high, and is, intentionally or not, lowered. If all people are going to be valued equally, than everyone should be valued as much as those people who are now considered most valuable. While I’m sure that there have been instances where someone has been described as “overvalued” by society, I haven’t come across one.

Criminal justice requires trade-offs because resources are limited. There simply aren’t the personnel, nor the money to pay for them, to apply a consistently high level of effort to every disappearance or death in which foul play is known, let alone suspected. And so law-enforcement agencies put their resources where there will be the loudest complaints of under-resourcing. And that tends to be those cases with the most attention from the public and the media. But it’s not only a one-way street. Part of the reason for the differential in how society values people is a justification of who resources are expended on. When the public focuses on women who are seen as mothers, daughters, students, and contributors to their communities, that’s done in part to justify granting investigations into what happened to them a greater slice of the resource pie.

Samuel Little, was, quite simply, bright enough to understand that, if he was going to indulge his recurring desires to choke girls and women to death, he had to be careful in who he selected.

For example, he said, “I’m not going to go over there into the White neighborhood and pick out a little teenage girl.”

Because murdering a little teenage white girl would have created incentives for more resources to be applied to both finding her, and finding who had victimized her. I’m not a fan of that incentive structure, but being actively troubled by it would mean not sleeping at night. After all, it’s a very common phenomenon.

In the end, the Post article (which, by the way, is from late 2020, before Samuel Little died in prison) is about casting law enforcement and the criminal justice system as indifferent, sometimes apparently deliberately. It’s the sort of thing that’s designed to highlight an injustice, while making it clear that the reader is absolved of any responsibility for it. That’s why it’s a “troubling truth about the U.S. criminal justice system” rather than a illustrative example of how societies choose to expend resources when hemmed in by constraints. If the United States, as a nation, wishes to avoid future instances of a serial murderer using the incentives that society creates to cover their tracks in the service of committing crime after crime, the populace as a whole is going to have to change those incentives. And to the degree that being troubled by them tend to disincentivize examining and understanding them, it acts to hasten, rather than prevent, the next series of killings.