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** Judge, Jury, Executioner: When the Government Decides Who Lives or Dies
By John & Nisha Whitehead
January 27, 2026
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“How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?”—Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind”

What does it say about a political movement that demands absolute reverence for life in the womb yet shrugs when the government kills, cages, or brutalizes the living?

What does it say about a government—and a political movement—that claims to value the unborn, but once you are born, that concern evaporates?

When life upon birth becomes expendable, subject to force, punishment, neglect, and death so long as it serves “law and order,” “national security,” or political convenience—when you can be shot by the police state, executed by the police state, starved, surveilled, displaced, raided, abused, or discarded by the police state—and this is treated not as a moral failure but as policy and doctrine, then you’re not dealing with a government that is truly pro-life.

It is pro-control.

If the measure of a society’s morality is how it treats its most vulnerable—the living, breathing, conscious—then a worldview that sanctifies life before birth but abandons it afterward is morally hollow.

Consider that on January 24, 2026—one day after the Trump administration paid lip service to the annual March for Life ([link removed]) in Washington, DC—37-year-old Minneapolis resident Alex Jeffrey Pretti ([link removed]) , an intensive care nurse who worked at a Veterans Affairs hospital, was shot and killed by an ICE agent during a federal immigration enforcement operation that exemplified the militarized, unaccountable force that has come to characterize ICE’s tactics.

Pretti’s death has sparked widespread protests, legal challenges, and national outrage, especially as videos and eyewitness accounts appear to contradict official claims ([link removed]) about how the encounter unfolded.

The Pretti shooting did not occur in a vacuum.

It was the second federal agent-involved shooting of an American citizen in Minneapolis ([link removed]) in January alone, part of the Trump Administration’s Operation Metro Surge that brought more than 3,000 federal agents into the city ([link removed]) and ignited protests nationwide.

Yet the problem is not merely who occupies the Oval Office. It is a bipartisan willingness to trade constitutional restraint for raw power—and to accept human casualties as the price of governance.

While President Trump has been particularly vocal about his willingness to act on his lack of respect for the lives of those he perceives as enemies, the erosion of respect for life all along the spectrum has accelerated under presidents of both parties, through expanded executive power, militarized enforcement, surveillance, detention, and lethal force in the name of safety, efficiency, or order.

When the government claims the power to decide whose life has value and whose does not—who may live and who may die in the name of “security,” “order,” or “efficiency”—it is no longer governing. It is playing god.
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A government that acts as if freedoms—and life, in turn—are privileges granted by the state has abandoned the foundational principle that rights are inherent and inalienable.

The danger deepens when religion is weaponized to sanctify state power: blessing some lives while discounting others, condemning abortion while excusing executions, mourning the unborn while rationalizing the killing of the living.

A belief system that claims moral authority yet remains silent—or worse, approving—when the state kills, cages, and brutalizes human beings is not pro-life.

Any theology that requires qualifying whose lives are worthy of protection has allowed itself to become a political tool.

This slippery slope is how religion loses its moral compass.

We see it in a system that celebrates the sanctity of life before birth while expanding the machinery of death after birth—through executions carried out in the name of justice, militarized policing carried out in the name of order, indefinite detention carried out in the name of security, shoot-first enforcement regimes that treat civilians as threats rather than human beings, and endless wars driven by greed, profit and ego.

State-sanctioned murder in the form of the death penalty is perhaps the clearest example of the government playing god: a system that asserts the moral authority to decide when a human life is no longer worthy of existence, despite well-documented errors, racial disparities, and irreversible consequences. In Texas alone, it took more than 70 years for the state to acknowledge that it had wrongfully executed an innocent young man ([link removed]) .

Nor are these executions limited to death chambers.

As the killing of Renée Good ([link removed]) makes clear, the modern police state now carries out executions in the streets—without trial, without jury, and without meaningful accountability.

When government agents act as judge, jury, and executioner, the distinction between capital punishment and law enforcement violence collapses.

Both rest on the same premise: that the state has the moral authority to decide, unilaterally and irrevocably, that a human life is no longer worthy of protection.

We see it in a bureaucracy that has armed itself like an occupying force—federal agencies equipped with military-grade weapons, surveillance tools, and near-total immunity—while insisting that this concentration of power is necessary for our safety.

We see it in the normalization of state violence: no-knock raids, warrantless searches, armed enforcement actions carried out in residential neighborhoods, and the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens during domestic enforcement operations that resemble a military deployment more than civilian law enforcement.

Alex Pretti’s death was the foreseeable end result of a system that normalizes state violence, immunizes authority from accountability, and treats human life as collateral damage.

In the aftermath of these killings, the Trump camp and its supporters have been quick to argue that those who are injured—or killed—would have been safer if they had simply stayed home, stayed quiet, and stayed out of the government’s way.

This is just a variation on the familiar rebuke offered up whenever Americans are injured or killed by police: comply, cooperate, obey. Do not resist. Do not argue. Do not question. Do not move suddenly. Do not make yourself noticeable.

The implication is clear: comply or die.

Yet in the American police state, compliance is no guarantee of survival.

Americans have been shot and killed while unarmed and compliant ([link removed]) —while holding cell phones, opening their front doors, standing in so-called “shooting stances,” carrying everyday objects, moving too slowly or too quickly, appearing confused, frightened, homeless, elderly, disabled, or simply present at the wrong moment.

To suggest that obedience will save us is not only recklessly irresponsible—it is dangerously delusional.

A system of governance that requires silence, submission, and invisibility in exchange for the mere possibility of survival is profoundly immoral and utterly unlawful.

A government cannot be held accountable—legally or morally—if its actions are hidden from view.

Of course, the police state understands that, which is why it wants the public to look away.

For those who answer a higher call, the moral imperative requires us to see suffering, to name wrongdoing, and to stand with those who are harmed by unjust power.

Likewise, Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan is not a lesson in minding one’s own business. It is a condemnation of those who passed by on the other side.

Legal observers, journalists, and ordinary citizens who document government misconduct are not obstructing justice—they are performing one of the oldest safeguards against tyranny: they are standing guard and bearing witness. They are insisting that government power not be exercised in secret, that force not be deployed without scrutiny, and that authority be subject to public judgment.

Alex Pretti was doing what a free people must do if freedom is to survive: refusing to let the government carry out its actions unseen and unchallenged.

When we tell citizens that they should stay home, stay silent, and avert their eyes if they want to remain safe, what we are really saying is that safety requires complicity through silence.

That is not order. That is not justice. That is not liberty.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak, not to act is to act.”

Albert Einstein echoed the warning: “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”

Both men witnessed firsthand how silence, indifference, and obedience allowed unspeakable atrocities to unfold in Nazi Germany.

This is how silence becomes entrenched government policy and how moral authority, once surrendered, is replaced by unchecked state power.

This is how life becomes negotiable: when a government can proclaim itself “pro-life” while funding wars, expanding execution chambers, starving the poor, criminalizing homelessness, militarizing police, and deploying armed agents into communities with little regard for collateral damage.

This is how a political movement can mourn unborn lives while dismissing the deaths of the living as unfortunate but acceptable casualties of enforcement.

And this is how constitutional protections—due process, the presumption of innocence, the right to be left alone—are quietly rebranded as obstacles to national security rather than safeguards of liberty.
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Once government is allowed to decide whose life matters, no life is safe.

History confirms this truth again and again: the power to decide who deserves protection inevitably becomes the power to decide who does not.

The Constitution was meant to stop this.

The Constitution was written precisely to prevent the concentration of god-like power in the hands of fallible, self-interested officials.

It divides power. It restrains force. It assumes human imperfection. It rejects the notion that any person or institution should wield unchecked authority over life and death.

The moment government agents are permitted to take life without due process, judicial oversight, and genuine accountability, the Constitution’s promise of equal protection and the rule of law ceases to exist in practice.

When federal agencies become standing armies, when enforcement replaces justice, when force substitutes for law, and when accountability disappears behind claims of immunity and national security, the Constitution is no longer functioning as intended.

What happened to Alex Pretti is what happens when those guardrails fail.

This moment cannot be treated as a footnote.

It demands a reckoning with how much power we have surrendered to the state and the even more dangerous idea that government can be trusted to wield absolute power benevolently.

So where do we go from here?

We must start by rejecting any government that defaults to force and asserts it dominance at gunpoint.

A constitutional government exercises restraint. It recognizes limits. It understands that power—especially the power to use violence—must be constrained, questioned, and accountable at every turn.

There is no way around it: we must dismantle the machinery of control that has normalized state violence.

That means ending the routine deployment of armed federal agents into civilian communities as though they were enemy territory. It means demilitarizing domestic enforcement agencies whose weapons, tactics, and mindset increasingly resemble those of standing armies rather than peace officers. It means rejecting enforcement regimes that treat human beings as threats to be neutralized instead of citizens entitled to due process and dignity.

Demilitarization is not radical. It is constitutional.

The Founders warned explicitly against standing armies, unchecked executive force, and centralized power precisely because they understood how quickly fear and authority combine to justify cruelty. Civilian law enforcement was never meant to operate as a battlefield force, nor were federal agencies meant to accumulate arsenals, surveillance powers, and immunity beyond meaningful oversight.

Yet that is exactly where we are.

If we are serious about restoring a government of laws rather than force, then we must roll back militarized policing, end warrantless and no-knock raids, restore strict limits on federal enforcement authority, and hold agents accountable when they abuse power—without exception.

Scaling back the massive funding for ICE and the DHS would be a good place to start.

The Constitution was not written to make government efficient. It was written as a restraint on government power. Its purpose is not to empower the state to act swiftly, decisively, or violently, but to restrain it from acting unjustly. Due process, the presumption of innocence, the right to be left alone, and the right to life itself are not inconveniences to be bypassed in the name of security. They are the very reason government exists at all.

When those protections are treated as optional, the Constitution becomes a relic.

Once we allow the government to treat any life as expendable, no one is beyond reach.

This is the line that must be drawn.

Not between unborn and born. Not between citizen and non-citizen. Not between order and chaos. But between a government that serves life—and a government that claims the power to take it, one “justified” killing at a time.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People ([link removed]) and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries ([link removed]) , anything less leads straight to the gas chambers.

The choice before us is simple, even if the work is not: restraint over force, accountability over immunity, and constitutional limits over godlike power.

WC: 2166

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ABOUT JOHN & NISHA WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His latest books The Erik Blair Diaries ([link removed]) and Battlefield America: The War on the American People ([link removed]) are available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected] (mailto:[email protected]) .

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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