The Death Penalty or Life Meaning Life

[MMI]

I cannot see how the dreadful law you quoted, which allows a person to execute a robber (not a killer) trying to escape with some property by shooting him in the back, enables that person (the killer) to say, the robbery backfired! The robbery would have backfired if the thief left empty-handed, or got caught up in a gun-fight, or if he shot himself by accident, but for a property-owner to shoot a man on the run, and who is no threat, is nothing less than a deliberate killing carried out in cold blood and without fear for one's own life. That law licences murder ... provided it is done at night time. Why night time? Perhaps the lawmaker realised the shamefulness of the wicked act it was legitimising. Or perhaps it is designed only to protect cowards.

Give me Sharia Law. At least an Imman has to decide the man's guilt according to some sort of process.

If you are a criminal who has not been convicted, you will not be punished, and therefore unconvicted criminals are irrelevant to this discussion. If you are convicted by due process of law, you deserve whatever the law decrees. If you have not been convicted, no-one, high or low, has the right to exact retribution. That right disappeared in the Dark Ages. Or was it the Stone Age?

To my mind, whoever framed that law was advocating Gun Law and anarchy. Maybe he was about to start a vendetta against the poor or the immigrants or something. Or maybe he was a psychopath who wanted to stay on the right side of the law.

I still cannot balance the equation Property = Life, so, in answer to your final question, yes it does matter. If I crash a stolen car and die through my own fault, or because I am drunk, that is an unfortunate accident that prevents justice running its course. If I die because the car is booby-trapped, then the owner will have murdered me. He will have contemplated a situation where an unauthorised person sits in the car and he will then have taken steps to kill that person: intention and act.

Only the obnoxious, retrograde law you have praised so highly can protect him.

[js207]

I cannot see how the dreadful law you quoted, which allows a person to execute a robber (not a killer) trying to escape with some property by shooting him in the back, enables that person (the killer) to say, the robbery backfired!

I'd say ending up dead as a result is just about the ultimate in backfiring. Most of the US has a law of 'felony murder', that a death which occurs in the commission of a felony (for example, someone you run over while making a getaway in a stolen car, or someone gets shot in your armed bank robbery) is legally considered to have been murdered by the perpetrators, because the original cause of the death was the crime itself, even if otherwise the death would have been a less serious charge (run someone over while driving your own car legally, it isn't classed as murder unless you actually drove at them deliberately). England and Wales had this rule too, but weakened it in 1957 to apply only to crimes of personal violence.

If I crash a stolen car and die through my own fault, or because I am drunk, that is an unfortunate accident that prevents justice running its course.

I neither see that as unfortunate (as long as nobody else is harmed: as I've said, I have no objection to criminals dying from their crimes) nor as having prevented justice from running its course. As for the booby-trapped car, if you hadn't stolen it nobody would have been harmed, so why is it the owner's fault rather than your own? My booby-trapped car is entirely safe, as long as nobody tries stealing it!

Much like the idiots every year who illegally obtain display-grade fireworks, not knowing that the fuses on them are non-delay ones (designed for remote triggering, or having a separate delay fuse attached), or indeed the IRA bombers who started experimenting with radio controlled detonators - then learned the hard way that anyone can send radio signals, not just the person assembling the bomb. Do you object to terrorists getting blown up by their own bombs thanks to radio jamming, too?

On a relevant footnote, I was relieved to see the Crown Prosecution Service declining to bring any charges over the stabbing of the burglar John Bennell in Salford this June. At the very least, one less burglar out there - and it wouldn't surprise me if burglary rates in the area fell afterwards too.