I wrote about the “Parot Doctrine” some time ago in connection
with separatism in Spain. Now I want to get back to this doctrine for another
reason. There are also other cases that have been touched by this doctrine and
this time it´s not so easy to deal with it. I talk about violent murderers of
young girls who, thanks to the Parot Doctrine, have left prisons as well.
The case is that the
Supreme Court in Strasbourg have to be “just” to everyone – if they release the
ETA terrorists, they have to release also other prisoners who are in the same
situation. But still there´s a smell of absurdity in all this. The problem is
that all the people are equal before the law and in case of a crime, it´s the
result of a crime that counts. It means that it doesn´t matter what´s the
motivation in committing a crime; if the result is death of other person, assassins,
serial killers or terrorists end up in more or less the same sentence. And now,
when I think about the psychopathic killer who brutally violated and then
murdered three young girls some thirty years ago and today he can freely leave
the prison, I just can´t understand the kind of justice that can permit this.
But it´s simple, as I briefly sketched before – the justice have to obey laws
and laws are in a vast majority consequencialist. What´s that mean? Only that
there is considered only the deed, the final result of an act, not its purpose
or intention. And rationally in most situations we are consequencialists – in
ordinary life it doesn´t mean nothing more than utilitarism. But still I can´t
help myself being somehow deontologistic in justice issues.
Of course there´s a big
problem in considering what the people are thinking before they do something or
in a process of doing something. Maybe they think they are doing the great
service for all the mankind and that the eternal life is waiting for them while
they blow the bomb that is fixed to their body in the crowded bus. And maybe
the murderer thinks he saves the little girl from this cruel world by cutting
her head off .. I just want to demonstrate that each and every case has its own
history and they can´t be classified simply according to corresponding laws.
Because there is a difference between the case that you brutally kill with your
own hands a young girl and know very well what you´re doing and the case that
you blow the time-bomb under a politicians car (and know very well what you´re
doing). I think here they should be considered the reasons and I also think
that the reason “to satisfy my sadistic tastes” is little bit different from
“to demonstrate a political inconvenience”. Yes, in both cases they are dead
people as a result, and in both cases the people responsible for these deaths
are sentenced for example to 30 years of prison. And eventually, in both cases
the people responsible for these deaths are released after these 30 years of prison
and you just have to ask “is that no one sees the difference between these two
cases?”
And at the same time we
can say the justice is too consequencialist, we have to admit that sometimes it
is deontologistic as well. For example in cases of self defence, or the
favourite one these days, mental incompetence. So if there´s a kind of
sentimental understanding at the side of a court in these cases and on the
other hand they just let go a brutal murderer who even don´t regret what he had
done, it´s highly incoherent.
But, the problems don´t
end up here, not at all! Let´s consider that the beast who killed those girls
should get rotten in the prison until his final day. And let´s consider that prisoners
live sometimes considerably better than the people with minimal income. Is this
just? So we start to think about the death penalty, but yet it´s not enough! I
have always thought about death penalty that it´s being so useless because
those who are sentenced to death don´t even care – they would prefer death before
living in prison for many years or until their natural death; so they
understand death as a rescue, a redemption. And maybe some of them admit they
deserve to die for what they have done but still it is a kind of escape – just
die, that´s all, bye .. I don´t accept such a punishment. It´s somehow not
enough for me. And of course there´s a problem of judicial errors – when the
wrong person is sentenced to death, there´s no remedy.
The Middle Ages is not
my favourite epoch, but the only thing I always liked on it were those very
elaborated torture methods and I seriously would put back the punishment of
torture up to date. Why should the poor parents of all those murdered children
live with the feeling that the guilty one is living a quite happy life in
prison, with all the advantages like studying, doing sports, theatre and
whatever else. And in case the guilty one is already dead, what´s the point
then? The maniacs just should be taken to being tortured like in Middle Ages –
they had very sophisticated kinds of torture then and I think these methods
should be resuscitated and applied today as an effective punishment.
So, to sum up, these
days in only one case of one doctrine, we can see how many problems we actually
have to deal with if we think about justice – consequencialism, deontology,
death penalty, life in prisons, satisfaction of survivors or victims .. I think
this is not my last word about judicial sphere.
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