No One Gains
That old biblical injunction of an 'eye for an eye', is simply an extension of human emotion yearning to cause equal pain to those who initiate pain upon others. A death for a death. In the case of James Holmes whose violently morbid fantasies overtook his sanity in a burst of delusionally vicious play-acting bringing his dreams of acting-out the role of a dark villain into a nightmare of grotesque terror for movie goers in Colorado, it seems public sentiment agitates for death."I had a huge adrenalin rush. I love the choice. I love it, I love it."
"I hope I'm in the room when he dies."
Bryan Beard, Colorado
"It's my determination and my intention that in this case, for James Eagan Holmes, justice is death", declared District Attorney George Brauchler. He had spoken with sixty relatives of those who had lost their lives in the July 20 rampage by James Holmes. Inspired by a midnight showing of a Batman film, the 25-year-old former neuroscience graduate student, dressed in body armour and a gas mask shot and killed twelve people.
The accused relayed an offer through his defence attorneys to plead guilty, and bring the trial to a quick ending, if his penalty could be one that would avoid the death penalty. But the mass of people who were interviewed, who mourned the death of their family members, preferred to leave no alternative to death in the offing for this mass murderer.
James Holmes' parents were there in the visitors' gallery of the courthouse. Sitting side by side they held hands in an agony of pain over the fate of their son. Their empathy for the anguish felt by the families of the murdered and the injured in that dreadful assault notwithstanding, this is their son whose abilities and interests were such a source of pride. He is now a condemned mass murderer. He has no future.
Just penalty for depriving so many others of their future?
Because the prosecution has demanded the death penalty, the prospect of the proceedings being strung out over a long period of time -- 10 to 15 years has been estimated -- is likely. "I would be in my 40s and I'm planning to have a family, and the thought of having to look back and reliving everything at that point of my life, it would be difficult", said Pierce O'Farrell, whom James Holmes had shot three times.
There are three people on death row in Colorado. The state has executed one person over the past 45 years. That execution took place in 1997.
And how's this for contemporary contrast in judicial decision-making...Horror is being expressed in the international community, with Amnesty International slamming a ruling issued by a court in Saudi Arabia. One that has decided to sentence a man to paralysis in retribution for a crime committed a decade earlier when now-24-year-old Ali al-Khawahir had stabbed a friend in the back, rendering him paralyzed from the waist down.
The court in the town of Al-Ahsa now has determined that unless the defendant pays one million Saudi riyals ($270,000) in compensation to the victim he must undergo a medical intervention which will render him paralyzed, as retribution for condemning his boyhood friend to that same condition. An eye for an eye considered the solution for a crime committed in a rabidly ultraconservative theocratic nation.
And in a technologically advanced, socially and politically enlightened country of the Western world, a death in retributive exchange for a series of deaths.
Labels: Controversy, Crime, Custom, Heritage, Human Relations, Justice, Saudi Arabia, United States
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, April 03, 2013
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