In the early morning of June 24 in Portland’s East Deering neighborhood, three unarmed young men were shot to death. Tuesday afternoon in Cumberland County Superior Court, they got lynched.

By all accounts, Nickolas Patenaude, Kevin Pinette and Dana Matthews were not model citizens. By the time they died, all in their early 20s, by the time Sabato Raia emptied his .22-caliber pistol into their heads, each had acquired bush-league rap sheets and reputations for acting tough.

Still, their past offenses should not have warranted a death sentence. And Raia, aided and abetted by a story tailored to fit Maine’s self-defense law and a justice system that allows victims to be further victimized, should not have been permitted to be their self-appointed executioner.

If only the night in question mattered, here’s what led up to this tragedy: The three are drinking in Raia’s bar; there’s an argument over Raia’s girlfriend (Patenaude’s ex) and a borrowed CD player; the three tell Raia they intend to come to his house to retrieve the player from the girlfriend’s car.

They arrive a half-hour later. Raia — no time to call the police but plenty of time to load his gun — is waiting. He greets them, not with the CD player in hand, but with a .22 in his waistband. Matthews reaches for a gun in his fanny pack. Bang. Oops, there’s no fanny pack, no gun. Patenaude comes after the terrified barkeep with a baseball bat. Bang. Oops, it’s a plastic snow brush. Pinette, sitting behind the wheel of his car, reaches behind the seat for his gun. Bang. Oops, it’s a wooden dowel rod.

Defense attorney Jack Simmons deserves high praise for his skillful legerdemain, turning an armed killer into a victim and the unarmed victims into the perpretrators. Before their very eyes, the jury saw three local rowdies transformed into some rampaging combination of Capone’s Mob, the Crips and a Salvadoran Death Squad. If nothing else, this travesty should spur the Legislature into a review of Maine law regarding the use of deadly force in self-defense.

So now it’s time for the Monday-morning quarterbacking. Perhaps Justice Carl O. Bradford could have placed some kind of reasonable cap on the endless testimony by people who did not witness the killings but who had plenty of bad things to say about the victims. Perhaps, in his instructions to the jury, he could have stressed the need to assess the plausibility of Raia’s story as much as he stressed the reasonableness of Raia’s fear. Perhaps the prosecution could have objected more strenuously to the character assassination.

And perhaps the jury could have given as much thought to the kind of society they want to live in as they did to the ease with which their community was able to rid itself of three troublemakers. Perhaps, the next time they’re in a fender-bender or an argument with a neighbor, they will.