Summary
A 15-year-old boy was sentenced to life in prison for fatally stabbing a stranger, Muhammad Hassam Ali, after a brief conversation in Birmingham city center. The second boy, who stood by, was sentenced to five years in secure accommodation. Ali’s family expressed their grief, describing him as a budding engineer whose life was tragically cut short.
Even if you now demand a life for a life, which isn’t your call to make, it very much is possible: He might save a life that, in prison or dead, he could not have saved. He might save twenty, even a million.
You’re plain and simply out for blood. An eye has been struck out, and you hide your desire to see the whole world blind behind “well, we don’t have to poke it out, we only have to sew it shut” (put him in prison vs. executing).
There’s virtually no crime that can be physically redeemed, except for property crimes. Literally any other criminal offense creates an irredeemable injury. But that is exactly why nearly developed country, except for the USA have a redemption-type penal system. How do you measure redemption? Is r*pe redeemed after 4 or 50 years? It will never be for the victim.
But what you can do is try to help everyone to not become criminal again. Because for one, guess what, they’re human too. They weren’t born criminal and aren’t criminal by nature once they’ve committed a crime. They have the right to live their life as much as the guy they killed. Once you have them forfeit their right to a free life, you commit a similar crime. One that in this case is done by objectifying them as an object rather than a subject.
This thinking is the result of hundreds of years of philosophical thinking and seeing the result of your mindset being used by tyrannys.
If they do not pose a danger to anyone anymore and have reformed then they are to be let go. Also in dubio pro reo.
As for minors, their mind is still developing, they may have cognitively known that killing someone is wrong, but they have not yet accepted it as their own moral. Not knowing even the basics of cognitive development of children, I feel like there’s not even a point to discuss with you
He might save a life that, in prison or dead, he could not have saved. He might save twenty, even a million.
Sure. He might save more lives than anyone who has ever existed. The chances of that happening are as good as winning the lottery, but hey, it could happen.
He might also take another life. Or twenty. Or a million. The chances of that are substantially higher: far more people lose the lottery than win anything at all.
The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. The best approach to playing the lottery is to lock up the money you would have used, and never let it out to buy a ticket.
If only he was now in a situation where he can be dealt with by specialists who can increase the odds substantially, and only be released if another set of specialists evaluate his mental state to have, as you put it, won the lottery.
Throw away the keys and you worsen the odds. Also, break the European Convention on Human Rights, which demands that there be a light at the end of a tunnel for everyone: Because denying it, no matter how far away it may seem, amounts to taking away his freedom to free development of personality. In other words, he has a right to work towards redemption. To, if not arrive, at least begin to learn to walk into the right direction. Everybody does.
Who are you to make a judgement on the future of his life while the blood on the knife hasn’t even dried yet? Can you predict the future? Make a judgement for the here and now, instead.
In other words, he has a right to work towards redemption.
He can study necromancy for the rest of his life, and attempt to raise his victim from the grave. That’s his right. If he accomplishes it, we can talk about clemency.
His right to seek redemption isn’t being infringed upon by locking him up permanently. It is the permanence of the death he caused that is denying him redemption.
