The roots of the legal system
I would like to offer some information that I am sure readers would find of interest in the death penalty debate. I worked for many years in the British legal system and would like to clarify some of the reasons that forced change in that country. We need to go back in history to see why, and how, basic principles were established regarding legal matters.
Legal systems as we know them today have their roots in the Roman justice system, which was established to provide good governance of its occupied lands, really a method of keeping the peace, in the period known as the Pax Romana.
Something very important to keep in mind here is the fact that people back then had the same levels of intelligence as we have now. They did not have access to the information we do, but they had the same ability to reason and solve problems.
Courts of law were established to resolve issues and maintain order, by the use of an independent body, emotionally removed from the crime or issue. The reason emotion must be excluded is that it clouds the mind and leads to a result that alleviates the emotion rather than solving the long-term goal of producing a peaceful society.
Emotion is produced by chemicals in the brain, not philosophy, and the Romans could see the patterns of behavior, even if they did not understand the science. We are the only living creatures that can transcend our chemicals, and reason beyond emotion. A dog’s life is purely governed by chemicals in its brain.
There is one thing that produces the deepest emotion in us, and that is the death of a loved one. The stress this causes desperately seeks a way out, and that will manifest itself as a desire for revenge.
The Romans knew this and wanted to create a system that was not designed to seek revenge, but to deal with an issue that produced a result that was fair, and could be accepted by all the parties involved. Revenge produces an immediate emotional response that can produce an injustice worse than the original crime, for example lynching. That’s why we should not take the law into our own hands.
History is full of instances of completely innocent people being put to death to satisfy emotional cravings. That’s why courts of law around the globe are not set up to provide a system for revenge. One wrongful killing of an innocent person is one too many, as you have committed murder, the wrongful killing of another human being. It’s not manslaughter because it is premeditated. Death is final, so if you kill the wrong person, you create another set of victims who feel equal grief, meaning your system has failed.
People give themselves the right to kill other people, it does not come from anywhere else. If you look at a list of the countries that still use the death penalty, it includes all the worst human rights violators, including the US. Do you really want to stand proudly with countries like Iran and North Korea? Of course not.
Now let’s deal with victims’ rights and feelings. Any solution to a problem must be one that all parties can accept, or the problem has not been solved. Killing the criminal does bring an immediate emotional release, but that is not the reason to have a legal system. Long-term social peace is what we are trying to achieve, and killing somebody for whatever reason sends a clear signal to all people who would murder: “If you think you have the right, it’s justifiable.” This was shown to be true when using corporal punishment, which produced good behavior in the short term, but in the long term gave children the impression that when they are big enough and feel justified, they can resort to violence.
The shining example for us all comes from South Africa and Northern Ireland, who showed that rising above your emotions was the only way to gain long-term peace. Former British prime minister Margret Thatcher’s attempts at solving the Northern Ireland problem just made it worse. If we want to reduce the number of future victims, we need to consider this. The US has the death penalty and a prison population that is a national disgrace, so arguments about deterrent are hard to justify.
When it comes to the time to choose, consider why we admire former South African president Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Ghandi, rather than former US president George W. Bush and Thatcher. The example they set is inspirational rather than emotional. It’s what makes us more than chemicals.
Peter Cook
Taichung
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