Justice & Law Quote by Jonathan Shapiro

Shapiro, a cartoonist by trade, writes like someone tired of watching basic civics get treated as optional. The line is deceptively procedural: it starts with bureaucratic calm ("there is a law") and ends in a blunt moral tripwire ("torture - physical, mental or otherwise"). That glide from legalism to human consequence is the point. He is using the language of statutes as a weapon against the fog machine of political rhetoric, where euphemisms like "rendition", "removal", or "extraordinary measures" try to launder brutality into administration.

The specific intent is corrective and accusatory at once. By naming the "Torture Convention", he pins the argument to a ratified commitment rather than partisan preference. It is a rhetorical move cartoonists love: take what powerful people want to make abstract, and label it in permanent ink. The phrase "reasonable expectation" matters, too; it’s a threshold designed for prevention, not postmortems. He’s not arguing about whether someone will be tortured with certainty. He’s arguing that the U.S. is legally bound to stop playing roulette with human bodies.

The subtext is a critique of a recurring American temptation: outsourcing violence to keep hands looking clean. "Deporting" is the sanitized verb; "subjected to torture" is the reality underneath. In the post-9/11 shadow - when debates over detainees, secret sites, and non-refoulement flared - Shapiro’s sentence lands as a reminder that legality is supposed to restrain fear, not bend to it.