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Defined Terms
Justice for the Innocent Victim or Victims (Retribution)
Below is an extract from
Australian Institute of Criminology - No. 3 - Capital Punishment - Feb 1987
- Compiled and written by Ivan Potas and John Walker - "The History of Capital Punishment in Australia":
"The concept of an 'eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth' is said to be applicable to capital punishment.
Under this theory, sometimes referred to as 'just deserts', it is not necessary to argue that the death penalty is instrumental in achieving some other purpose such as community protection or deterrence,
the person who murders, it is said, should be executed for the sake of justice alone."
"Since the
beginning of time, justice has been defined as retribution. Not to be confused with revenge – driven by personal
malice – retribution is the innate understanding that it is right to
punish an individual in fair proportion to the crime they have
committed. Our instinctive longing to see wrongs made right can be
traced back to our earliest days. Even the youngest child recognises
that the schoolyard bully should be held to account."
The prevailing propensity for incarceration
as the primary form of
Punishment does not place any weight
in recognising Justice for the Innocent Victim (or Victims) whose life or lives were taken
from them.
That is a fundamental flaw in the
Australian
Criminal
Justice System which is not the case in the majority of other countries
presently, and certainly was not the case in Australia's past. A 'past'
that our current politicians should learn from. Our policy makers of the
earlier history of Australia displayed infinitely more courage and pragmatism.
Below is an
extract from
The case for capital punishment:
"When Lord Stevens, the former
Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, argued on Sunday that
his opposition to capital punishment had been overturned by the
shooting of a policewoman in Bradford last week, he was joining
that usually silent band of intelligent people who feel that
society affords inadequate protection to the innocent. And,
predictably, he has been vilified for it by a noisy minority
who, in the security of their comfortable existences, feel that
anyone even suggesting the restoration of a death penalty for
murder in this country must be certifiably insane or a complete
pervert."
Below is an
extract from
Why capital punishment can no longer be dismissed
"The third and fundamental argument
is far more powerful: that of "proportionality" - that the punishment
should fit the crime. "Proportionality" is one of the key considerations
in the current review of the sentencing framework being undertaken by the
Home Office. If you have an objection in principle to capital punishment,
then the proportionate sentence for child murder must be a life sentence,
for it is the nearest to true proportionality allowed by law. If you have no
principled objection, and once you have eliminated mistaken identity, then
proportionality in cases such as Sarah Payne's can mean only one thing."
Retribution is the innate understanding that it is right to punish an individual
in fair proportion to the crime they have committed. Our instinctive longing
to see wrongs made right can be traced back to our earliest days.
Below is an extract from
Arguments in favour of capital punishment - BBC Ethics:
"First a reminder of the basic argument behind Retribution and
Punishment:
-
all guilty
people deserve to be punished
-
only guilty
people deserve to be punished
-
guilty people
deserve to be punished in proportion to the severity of their crime
This argument states that real justice requires people to suffer for
their wrongdoing, and to suffer in a way appropriate for the crime. Each
criminal should get what their crime deserves and in the case of a
murderer what their crime deserves is death.
Many people find that this argument fits with their inherent sense of
justice.
It's often supported with the argument "An eye for an eye". But to argue
like that demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of what that Old
Testament phrase actually means. In fact the Old Testament meaning of
"an eye for an eye" is that only the guilty should be punished,
and they
should punished neither too leniently or too severely.
Justice for the Innocent Victim/s
(Retribution)
is not one
of the
Seven Purposes of Sentencing
convicted criminals.
If
Justice for the Innocent Victim/s was a quantifiable measurement when
determining a
Sentence, the below listed more
recent rape-murders, and
several hundred murders of other innocent females
since the 'death penalty' was
removed as a Sentencing option around the middle
of the last century, would have been
considerably less
likely to have tragically occurred:
The tragic deaths of comedian,
Eurydice Dixon,
Aiia Maasarwe,
8 year old Sofia Rodriguez-Urrutia Shu,
9 year
old
Ebony Simpson,
Prue Bird,
two Bega High School students, Lauren Barry and Nichole Collins,
Mersina Halvagis, Nicole Patterson and
Margaret Maher, nurse
Anita Cobby,
Lisa Maude
Brearley,
teenagers Kerryn Henstridge and Anne Smerdon.
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