Translated material
Talion principle
“Very many people face death calmly and firmly - some out of fanaticism, some out of vanity. But neither fanaticism nor vanity will withstand shackles or chains, blows with a stick, a yoke, or prison bars,” wrote the Italian lawyer and criminal law reformer Cesare Beccaria in 1767 in his treatise “On Crimes and Punishments.”
It can be assumed that if Saddam was given a choice between life imprisonment or execution, he would choose the latter. Hussein was afraid not of death, but of oblivion. A life sentence would eventually do to him what he really feared: over time, Saddam would be forgotten. The execution turned him into a symbol.
Commenting on a video of the execution circulated on the Internet, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said: “The scene of Hussein’s execution made him a martyr.” This is what the former dictator sought. This is how he will go down in history: a man with a noose around his neck, responding with a slight smile to the insults of his executioners seconds before death, and not a tyrant.
The unauthorized video recording of Saddam's execution sparked an investigation. But this cell phone footage shows better than anything else that the death penalty is not about justice, but about the natural human impulse to seek revenge. But the concepts of “revenge” and “fair punishment” are by no means synonymous. That's why the video recording of Saddam's execution had such an effect in the world. Shocked by this effect, Italian Ambassador to the UN Marcello Spatafora submitted to the Security Council a proposal for a general moratorium on the death penalty.
The persistence with which the new Iraqi government sends the former leaders of this country to the next world suggests that their execution for the current elite of Iraq is primarily a political step, and not an act of fair punishment of criminals.
The so-called “principle of talion” - the principle of retribution equal in force to the crime - was expressed in the code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, as well as in Hebrew law. In the mass consciousness, this principle exists in the form of a common quote from the Old Testament: “An eye for an eye.”
Many great philosophers have expressed diametrically opposed arguments for and against the death penalty. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, considered execution not just fair, but in some cases the best punishment, especially when applied to murderers and persons guilty of crimes against the state. Frenchman Voltaire advocated the abolition of the death penalty, “except in one case when there is no other way to save the lives of a large number of people, when a mad dog is also killed.”
According to the human rights organization Amnesty International, in 2005, at least 2,148 prisoners were executed in 22 countries and another 5,186 people were sentenced to capital punishment in 53 countries. These data reflect only cases known to human rights activists. In reality, the number of executions is much higher.
Since the early 1990s, more than 40 countries around the world have completely abolished the death penalty. About 75 countries provide for this punishment in their legislation, but they rarely use it. Approximately 90% of all executions in the world occur in four countries - China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the United States. It is interesting to note that the United States, together with Japan, are the only developed industrial powers where this measure of punishment has been preserved.
Modern defenders of the death penalty appeal to it as a deterrent: a future murderer, knowing that he himself may be deprived of life for killing a person, will think twice before committing this crime. But, according to statistics, in European Union countries where the death penalty is prohibited, murders are committed less frequently than in the United States. And in those American states that do not have the death penalty, crime rates are lower than in Texas, where executions are used more often than anywhere else in America.
The consequences of an execution cannot be corrected, while miscarriages of justice occur all the time. Every country that uses the death penalty as its ultimate punishment ends up killing an innocent person sooner or later. In 2000, Illinois Gov. George Ryan imposed a moratorium on executions after it was discovered that 17 of the 160 people on death row had been wrongfully convicted. What kind of fair punishment can we talk about if these people were executed? Meanwhile, life imprisonment as the ultimate measure leaves a chance to correct any judicial errors.
The “principle of talion,” which proclaims violence as the only method of combating violence, is itself the cause of cruelty in society. The death penalty is a barbaric punishment. By using it, we only show that we are no different from our distant ancestors: we have not become smarter, more cultured, or more civilized. We still haven’t understood that of all the things that can be taken away from a person, only life cannot be returned to him. Life, once taken, is irreplaceable. Even God did not punish Cain with death. What right then do we have to this?