Justice is one of Ralph’s most deeply held values. He believes in following the rules laid out by the justice system even when those rules are hard and might result in a murderer going free. From the outset of the Peterson investigation, Ralph is therefore uncomfortable with what he is doing. His conscious mind is telling him it is all right to make an exception to his usual procedures because he knows the truth—that Terry is a vicious child-murderer who will almost certainly strike again. Furthermore, by every law of nature Ralph knows, the evidence against Terry is incontrovertible.

The key word is “knows.” Ralph takes it on faith that he knows what kind of things are and are not possible, but the US justice system is premised on the recognition of human fallibility. It uses laws and procedures to reduce human error as much as possible. With Terry’s death, Ralph recognizes the consequences of acting outside the blueprint of the legal system. He had believed that knowing the “truth” freed him to bend rules. However, bending rules is exactly what Ollie Peterson did, and a man who might have been innocent died.

Samuels describes Terry’s death as frontier justice, but Ralph now sees that mob rule and vigilantism are too prone to error.