EYE FOR AN EYE, DEATH FOR A DEATH

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[Spanish Version]

Human cruelty has no limits. Since Cain killed Abel, his sons have taken control of the world with the sign of their sickness in its face, and now they own the planet and its five continents. Justice and the creation of laws with penal codes describe what punishment each criminal deserves based on the seriousness of the crime(s) he commits, which has been a way to try to stop the meanness and barbarity into which we were born. These laws and penal codes were created to prevent the victims from seeking revenge against the criminals.

One of the first attempts  to limit  vengeance with a proportional punishment was  Hummuraby´s Code, based on what is known as Thalion´s Law (Lex Talionis)--a principle of Roman Law that can be explained by the expression: Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.

Law has evolved since the era of the Romans. Nowadays, it is not a system to prevent victims of crimes from becoming killers, robbers, or rapists. The state makes the laws and its objectives are not even related to the victims, especially in some countries where the state is not considered a superior moral entity, so the state is not allowed to kill or be over the law. However, many people still think that Lex Talionios is a scary way to serve justice and in some areas the goverment is allowed to seek revenge for the victims.

Amnesty International in its annual report about the death penalty says that capital punishment is applied in 58 countries and is legal in 93 for civil crimes. If we analyze military law, the state can kill people in seven more countries.

Although the death penalty was created as a way to compensate victims of an illegal action and prevent them from becoming criminals, nowadays the existence of this kind of penalty is justified in some countries as a deterrent to keep people from thinking that it is cheap to do such a crime as murder. The ratio of crimes that are considered for the death penalty aren’t consistent with this argument, and in countries where capital punishment is not legal, there aren´t more murders than in those where it is allowed. However, some goverments are careless with the data, so this year Indonesia appraised drug trafficking with the death penalti.


On the other hand, there are 98 countries where the state can´t kill an individual person in any case. They argue that capital punishment cannot be changed after they are executed. However, in countries where this kind of penalty is legal, it is because a judge has decided that in that nation, death is considered fair. A change in judgement must be justified and for that, it must be demonstrated that the trial, where the decision was made, was not a fair trial. China, Vietnam and North Korea consider all their executions to be secrets of the state so the death penalty is not used as a kind of punishment for some criminal acts because they are taking  those crimes out of the justice jurisdiction. But to find unfair trials which end in a death, we don´t need to go to countries submitted to a dictatorships. In 2014, two men were killed by the Texas government after an unfair prosecution because the police didn’t offer them the option to have consular support although both of them were Mexican. US security forces are obligated to notify the detention of all non-American criminals to the consulate of the country that they are from by the Vienna International Agreement; by killing these two delinquents, Texas disobeyed an international law in a controversial issue, as is the death penalti.

 However, these two cases in Texas were exceptions. Justice has evolved from Lex Talionis and nowadays the objective is not to stop a possible chain of revenge after a crime is committed. The victims can´t be the judges now so the civil goal is to fix the damages and to make the criminal understand his fault so that he can have the possibility to live free in society again. That´s the point of view of Amnesty International, but in some countries capital punishment depends on cultural and educational facts. The most important topics to understand are how the moral superiority of the State is used, and how it should be used.