Wu Kangren was praised as a "human rights fighter" by his colleagues, but he knew he was willing to defend this "scum" because he was not far away from this "scum". The humble king snake almost became a member of a criminal gang when he was young, just because he was two minutes late with diarrhea and missed the bus to fight. His life trajectory is different. For Wu Kangren, he is only two minutes away from becoming a "scum".
Some people criticized Arendt for washing the floor for Nazi atrocities. Perhaps the fact is that starting from a self-centered mentality, which sounds normal, a person can walk into a distant and terrible valley. What really bothers us is that Arendt knocked down the wall between "them" and "us", making us uneasy to think that no one is an evil insulator. "Those murderers look just like you and me."
As a lawyer, Wu Kangren certainly knew that if he broke the law, he would be punished, but he just closed the case quickly, which didn't mean anything to prevent similar cases from happening. The murderer and even the society need not only punishment, but also forgiveness and compassion. The purpose of forgiveness and compassion here is not to escape the trial of the law, but to stop treating the murderer as an inhuman person. It is the premise of compassion to think of yourself as a sinful person like the murderer. As the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol famously said in his will, "What needs to be considered is not the darkness of others, not the darkness of the world, but the darkness of one's own heart".