Ms Cyprah

No, I couldn’t do it at all, no matter how guilty they were and even if they had harmed a love one. I wouldn’t want to do it either, because I am one of those who do not believe that evil cures evil. I believe that love and positivity affect people’s actions far more than revenge or cruelty. We tend to treat behaviour as the actual personality,solid and unchanging. But though one’s personality tends to be fixed, a person can always change their behaviour with education, experience, empathy, compassion, understanding and, above all, being treated with value.

Sometimes if we channel their energies into other aspects of life, we can also get the positive results we seek. The reason why we have so much crime and re-offending is because the emphasis is on punishment in society instead of educating and rehabilitating. Of course, once the term is served, the prisoner is then back out in society, disjointed from family, friends and job, with nothing worthwhile to do, perhaps nowhere to live and, more likely, with very little money, then expected to pick up where they left off and lead a decent life. But that is very difficult in many cases where people lack the basic emotional, physical and material resources to help themselves.

For long-term prisoners, getting their life back on an even keel must be so hard, after years of being at the state’s disposal and having everything provided for them in a secure environment. No wonder the temptation is there to re-offend so as to get things as they were.

I think in certain murder cases, especially where it has been deliberate and planned, the person should be executed too. And I would probably be prepared to push the switch, even if it were for a woman. So gender wouldn’t make any difference. But I have to say that many people who bay for the blood of others would baulk at carrying out the sentence themselves if they were required to do it because it is obviously better for someone else to do the messy work.

In the end, I guess if someone did something to our loved one, we could be barbaric in our reaction towards them. However, I guess if, like jury service, we all had to do that gruesome punishment we are calling for, at some time in our lives, it might make us think twice about what we wish to happen to others in our justice system and might even lead to more effective long-term solutions.

No one has that right. We are either ruled by the law, or we are not. Once anyone takes the law into their own hands and does what he/she likes, with the blessing of everyone else, we have sunken beyond animal levels. It becomes a free for all, the strong brutalising the weak.

Take the example of the man who buggered his stepson with a tool handle in revenge for him raping his half-sister. What makes this man any less of a
criminal than the stepson he was hurting? What makes him less brutal than the stepson? What makes him any different if he can quietly and calmly plan and execute that on someone? That young man clearly needed psychological help, not revenge. Changing his life so that he doesn’t repeat that awful act should be more important than damning him forever. Otherwise we will simply get more of the same. The answer is to try to change the law, or protest about it, not become judge and jury ourselves. The law cannot apply to some and not to others.

It is not an eye for an eye that let’s us retain our sight. It’s love, education and forgiveness. Given America’s history of hangings, lynchings and swift justice, and the consequences of those, one would have thought it would have learnt something from them by now. They weren’t the answer then, and they are not the answer now. Two wrongs NEVER make a right. It is easy to bay for someone’s blood when it has nothing to do with us, but it would be an entirely different thing if the teenager were related to us.

When we are angry and mad at someone, where do we stop short in that justice? That boy could have died later from the effects of what was done to him. It all depends on a person’s capacity to bear such actions. Everyone is different. And what would have happened then? Both the father and the brother would have been gone, devastating the whole family in the process. People also forget the psychological effect on that poor girl, not only of the rape, but she will mistakenly continue to believe, for a long time to come, that she was responsible for what happened to both her brother and her Dad. I think she could have done without that as well.

If we are going to start deciding what punishment everyone should have for any crime we don’t like, and also do it ourselves, given the chance, why do we need any kind of laws? We might as well go back to the caveman days of everyone for himself. Some of the chilling comments I heard around the case showed that we have hardly evolved through the centuries, despite our so-called education and innovations. We are still back there somewhere, living by a lawless code to suit ourselves when we feel like it, yet expecting some kind of law to work for us when we are in need of it.

We really cannot have it both ways. Using violence against another doesn’t make anyone into a man/woman. That’s the mark of a coward taking out their feelings of inadequacy on another equally helpless person simply to feel self righteous. It solves nothing at all in the end except the sad destruction of everyone involved.