An eye for an eye --> whole world (literally) blind.

[nerdanel]

Although I've been trying not to spend much time posting online, I've been struggling with this story all day.

-- warning: description of an upsetting crime below. Also, be aware that the Guardian link posted below opens with a photo of the disfigured victim. --

Today, I heard of the story of Iranian woman Ameneh Bahrami. Six years ago, she was a university student who repeatedly spurned the advances of fellow student Majid Movahedi. He reputedly stalked her, insisted that she had no choice but to be with him, and (in a now-familiar-to-me theme, after a year spent studying asylum and human rights law), the police refused to intervene to protect her. The final straw for Movahedi came when Bahrami declined his marriage proposal. The next time he stalked her, it was with a container of sulfuric acid. He threw the acid in her face point-blank, blinding her in both eyes, horrifically disfiguring her face, and causing additional injury to her hands and arms. She fled to Europe, where she endured seventeen surgeries to try to reconstruct her face and to restore her vision. Doctors were briefly able to restore 40 percent vision to the eye that had survived the attack, but she again lost that vision following an infection.

Meanwhile, Movahedi turned himself in to the Iranian authorities and confessed the crime fully. I expect that he thought the outcome would be a jail sentence and damages paid to the victim. That was the initial sentence. The victim, however, demanded that he be punished to the full extent of Sharia law, which endorses a Biblical tenet I had always viewed as figurative: an eye for an eye. Or, in this case, two eyes for two eyes: at the victim's insistence, the sentence (recently upheld on appeal) was that Movahedi was to be placed under general anesthetic at a hospital, while either a doctor or the victim herself placed 5-20 drops of sulfuric acid in each eye. This sentence was to be carried out today, and Bahrami had traveled to Iran to be present. However, following an international outcry, Iran has again deferred execution of the sentence.

To be honest, my reaction to the whole thing is for my brain to want to shut down. The barbarism and brutality of the crime is difficult even to comprehend, and the additional barbarism and pain that would be caused by such a purely retributive sentence is also intense (for a doctor to place acid in someone's eye with the intention of causing blindness? Say what?) The few scattered thoughts I've been able to muster:

I had not been optimistic that Iran would take these instances of gendered violence seriously enough to try to deter them, and I suppose from that perspective I am gratified that they seem to get the seriousness of the crimes being committed by men such as the defendant. But my mind boggles at the barbarism of the sentence.

So then I end up just mentally toggling between the barbarism of the sentence and the even-more-barbaric admitted crime (the victim wasn't unconscious when acid was thrown in her face). And then I think about the extreme emotional (and possibly still physical, given the unsuccessful operations) pain the victim must be in, and what a deep, raw place the wish to drip acid into an unconscious person's eyes must come from. Then I imagine being disfigured and blinded at the hands of said person and wonder what I would want. (NB I'm certainly not saying that the victim's wishes should inform the defendant's punishment at all, especially when the wishes are so extreme.)

But at the same time I'm forced to reflect on how impotent a "civilized" criminal justice system must feel to a victim of so egregious a crime. To lose your eyesight for the rest of your life; to have a hole where one eye should be; to be transformed from a beautiful young woman to a person whom many have difficulty even looking at...and to understand that all three of these things will persist for the rest of your natural life, even after the extreme pain of the acid and the continual surgeries has faded .... it's easy for me to grasp the concept that it would seem to someone in that position that merely restricting the liberty of the person who had done these things, particularly for some period less than life, would itself seem a rather profound form of injustice.

I suppose the broader issue is how "civilized" people should respond to acts of barbaric inhumanity. Probably all reasonable people would agree that the answer is, "Not with sulfuric acid." But I have not been persuaded by my time in Europe that "justice" means moving towards continually more moderate, forgiving periods of incarceration for the most violent, inhumane crimes. And when it comes to acts like this, which seem to me to more egregious in the long-term suffering they cause than even some near-instant murders with little pain, I'm forced to reflect on the impotence of incarceration as an "adequate" response. Perhaps the only answer is that even if incarceration is impotent and inadequate, it must be accepted, because the alternative is a society of state-sanctioned brutality and fear. (Of course, it bears noting that a society in which men are not adequately deterred in the strongest possible terms from terrorizing and brutalizing women who reject their romantic advances is also, quite bluntly, a society of state-sanctioned brutality and fear.) But if Movahedi merely spends some number of his remaining years in prison - even if the number is "all of them" - I question whether, and why, it would amount to justice. Certainly not as viewed through his victim's unseeing eye(s).

[Frelga]

Yes, it's a difficult case. On the one level, the reasoned, civilized response is, as you say, "Not with sulfuric acid." On the other, there's a gut response of "Why the hell not?" In the balance, the civilized response ought to prevail, but I am hard pressed to explain why at he moment.

BTW, the whole "eye for an eye" thing is horribly misinterpreted. Far from demanding gruesome vengeance, it was meant to moderate the punishment not to exceed the crime. So, a crime against property, such as theft, was to be punished with fine only, never with hanging or cutting off hand, as was the custom in much of the world even recently. Capital punishment was reserved for murderers only, and the burden of proof was tremendous, far above what reasonable doubt would entail (I need to look it up). In that spirit, in the ancient time the eye was not actually taken out in punishment, for fear that the prisoner would die as the result, this violating the commandment.

On a side note, it is the first time that I hear of a Sharia law being enforced against a man and in "favor", for lack of better word, of a woman. It is somewhat positive, somehow.

[Holbytla]

From what I have read, I have seen no reference to what brings a person to consider such a heinous crime in the first place, nor whether it is merely (hah, like anything so insane as that could be considered merely) heinous or truly insane.

There is something "wrong" here other than what is apparent on the surface.

There is no regress for the woman, and there is no way the criminal should be allowed to mete out his own punishment. It seems to me that he is in some way attempting to make what he did go away by seeking solace in what his convoluted mind sees as justifiable compensation for his act. He is attempting to ease his own suffering by essentially plucking his own eyes out, and any society that is willing to go along with that is as distorted as he is.

[Túrin Turambar]

I think that if this question was asked generally or in the abstract - "do you believe that blinding with acid is a potentially appropriate penalty a criminal justice system?" - then the responses on this thread would be unmitigated shock, horror and revulsion. There would be no question at all of it being a difficult case or a topic for debate, and we would view it no differently to stoning to death, cutting off limbs or other similar punishments. And while I appreciate the questions raised by the facts in this case, I think that trying to establish the suitability or justice of particular penalties based on particular extreme cases is a profoundly misguided approach. It's like debating the death penalty on Ted Bundy's case alone.

[Frelga]

On the other hand, is the justice system designed to deal with run-of-the-mill wickedness equipped to deal with extreme cases?

In the end, the civilized approach must win because it's not about the perp. It's about the rest of the participants in the justice system, and the public itself. But it does at times feel entirely inadequate.

P.S.: an unrelated article brought this into focus for me by reminding me something I often tell myself: Revenge is not the same is justice.

[Nin]

There is (or should be) a fondamental difference in a crime and in a legal sentence. And this fondamental difference makes blinding with acid IMHO a crime and a state who accepts it as punishment is a criminal state. Now, Iran can be considered as such on many other issues (stoning as a death penalty).

So, my answer is no. It is not an appropriated legal punishment and it adds nothing to justice. The only convincing argument is that other men might be dissuaded from acid attacks but I do think that a it takes a larger society and mentality change to reach that.

In a more general way, I don't think that the general level of violence and crime in a society depends maily form its legal system and the severeness of its punishements. I am living in a country where the crime rate is generally low - of course, houses are burgeled and purses are stolen, but safety in the streets is high and violent crimes are rare. But, punishments are often low. I rather think that it is the general level of wealth and acceptance of inidividual violence that generates criminality. If a country is poor and/or people think that they have the right to carry out the law by themselves, you will have crimes.

[ToshoftheWuffingas]

Cruelty begets cruelty.

[nerdanel]

A scattered mix of thoughts:

On a side note, it is the first time that I hear of a Sharia law being enforced against a man and in "favor", for lack of better word, of a woman. It is somewhat positive, somehow.

I hadn't seen it this way before your comment, Frelga, but I think this is why: both Sharia law and the Iranian state are constructs that classically disempower, marginalize, and subjugate women. The Iranian government, in particular, often refuses to intervene to protect women from violence or actively enables that violence. For a woman to be able to demand that the state machinery of Iran retaliate forcefully for a gendered act of violence - is transgressive and oddly empowering. (Note: some versions of the story claim that the man was to be blinded in only one eye, "because a woman is worth half as much as a man." That variant is less empowering.)

And while I appreciate the questions raised by the facts in this case, I think that trying to establish the suitability or justice of particular penalties based on particular extreme cases is a profoundly misguided approach.

I am not trying to establish the justice of particular penalties based on particular extreme cases, L_M. I am trying to determine whether a traditional penalty (imprisonment) is a "just" response to a particular extreme crime. I didn't invent an extreme hypothetical, like the classical "ticking time bomb" invoked to justify interrogational torture. This is a real case that unfolded in real time this weekend. If it is misguided to assess the justice of imprisonment (or blinding) in response to the real crime being considered this weekend, then you are effectively saying that it is misguided to discuss the criminal response to extreme crimes at all.

There is (or should be) a fondamental difference in a crime and in a legal sentence. And this fondamental difference makes blinding with acid IMHO a crime and a state who accepts it as punishment is a criminal state. Now, Iran can be considered as such on many other issues (stoning as a death penalty).

It sounds like you're saying that it is not legal to inflict a crime as a legal sentence. That doesn't get us very far as a line of reasoning, though, because each penalty that is inflicted in response to crime would itself be a crime if inflicted outside the justice system. That is, consider a sentence of twenty years (locked in a jail cell) for murder, rape, or aggravated assault. We don't believe that the state is committing a crime in locking the convicted defendant away for twenty years. However, the state's act WOULD be a crime if inflicted outside of the criminal context: if I lock someone in a cell for twenty years, I have obviously committed (probably multiple) crimes. Similarly, the state can confiscate money or property in response to crime; if this taking of money occurred outside of the criminal justice process, it would constitute a crime. And most obviously of all, it is legal under international law as well as the domestic laws applying to 80 percent of the world's population for the state to take life in response to aggravated murder. Killing is of course a crime outside the context of a legal sentence. So, if the state can kill, lock people in boxes for years at a time, and deprive them of property as a response to crime - all otherwise criminal acts - it is not the criminal status of assaulting/blinding someone with sulfuric acid per se that makes it an illegitimate state response. (Indeed, if the state could only respond to crime with "non-criminal" acts, it would not be empowered to do much at all. Perhaps it could sit criminals in a room and lecture them sternly.)

I think it more likely goes to the privileged, central status of the body itself. One thing that has struck me in studying human rights is that the prohibition on torture and inhumane and degrading treatment is absolute. It is, strikingly, "more absolute" (if you will) than the prohibition on taking life or the prohibition on deprivation of liberty. For instance, although the death penalty remains legal under international law, torture is forbidden as an absolute, universal peremptory norm; no derogation is permitted for national security, criminal justice, or any other reason. Thus we may respond to a kidnapper/false imprisoner by locking him in a box; we may respond to a murderer by executing him. But we may not respond to a rapist by raping him, or to an acid attacker with sulfuric acid. It is a fascinating order of priorities, but one with which I tentatively agree.

[Nin]

It sounds like you're saying that it is not legal to inflict a crime as a legal sentence.

No, I am not saying this. I say that there is fondamental difference between a crime and legal sentence as the latter claims to be legitimate. And while I fully understand and accept the necessity of punishment like emprisonnement, blinding with acid is, as I said, in my opinion a crime, even when executed by a state in the process of a legal action. Of course, it is not a crime by legal definition then - like discrimination under the appartheid laws was not a crime. But it is moral crime, according to my - admittedly western a European - standard. A state which accepts this kind of punishment is a criminal state. This is just my opinion.
Just for information, I hold the same opinion about death penalty.

[axordil]

Punishments such as fines, imprisonment, and even capital punishment have social components: they either separate an offender from society, to keep them from doing harm (in the case of capital punishment, irrevocably) or they take the assets of an offender to recompense society for the wrong the offender has done to society. Where is the social component in maiming someone?

[eborr]

I am a little surprised that this is even a subject for debate amongst civilised people.

[nerdanel]

I am a little surprised that this is even a subject for debate amongst civilised people.

No one in this thread has endorsed maiming or blinding. However, I am surprised at the tenor of comments like yours, which seem to suggest that the matter of an adequate punishment for extreme violence should not even be discussed.

To the extent this reflects the view that imprisonment is the "civilised" and only reasonable punishment such that no further discussion is needed, this is an incredibly Western view. I was, for instance, surprised to learn in human rights of one Latin American indigenous tradition that forcefully rejects incarceration as, well, "uncivilised" and barbaric. They see it as a form of cruelty that alienates the individual from his family and instills vices. For them, a short period of physical punishment and humiliation (e.g., whipping + stocks, not maiming) is the civilised course: they view it as a short reconciliation ritual between the individual and his community, after which the individual is reintegrated with and accepted by his community. They react angrily to Western suggestions that they are violating the defendants' human rights, suggesting that our practice of warehousing violent criminals in jails is far more violative of the human interests in dignity and liberty, whilst they are more respectful of human rights. I still haven't decided what I make of their argument, but I don't think it's trivial. This by way of saying, as a side note, assuming it is legitimate that the response to "crime" should be "unpleasant" (and it will not surprise me in the least if Western Europe rejects that contention within my lifetime) ... what constitutes a legitimately "unpleasant" response versus a cruel response is very much in the eye of the beholder. All civilised people have not reached some unilateral consensus; the topic is still ripe for discussion.

I began this thread by noting that all reasonable people could agree that maiming via acid was barbaric and an unacceptable legal response. No one has disagreed. There is no debate on that point. However, I don't think it's illegitimate to discuss what other responses might be suitable, including whether incarceration is "the right" or "the only" response. I really am concerned about the tone of the comments that suggest that this is somehow an inappropriate or illegitimate discussion to have.

[Pearly Di]

This guy did a horrible, horrible thing. That poor woman. He deserves a severe punishment (which, in my book, would be incarceration). I cannot, however, endorse a state action that is as barbarically cruel as his own atrocious crime.

BTW, the whole "eye for an eye" thing is horribly misinterpreted. Far from demanding gruesome vengeance, it was meant to moderate the punishment not to exceed the crime. So, a crime against property, such as theft, was to be punished with fine only, never with hanging or cutting off hand, as was the custom in much of the world even recently. Capital punishment was reserved for murderers only, and the burden of proof was tremendous, far above what reasonable doubt would entail (I need to look it up). In that spirit, in the ancient time the eye was not actually taken out in punishment, for fear that the prisoner would die as the result, this violating the commandment.

Thanks for pointing this out, Frelga. I've heard Christian scholars of the Hebrew Bible make exactly this same point.

I hadn't seen it this way before your comment, Frelga, but I think this is why: both Sharia law and the Iranian state are constructs that classically disempower, marginalize, and subjugate women.

Oh, absolutely.

The Iranian government, in particular, often refuses to intervene to protect women from violence or actively enables that violence. For a woman to be able to demand that the state machinery of Iran retaliate forcefully for a gendered act of violence - is transgressive and oddly empowering.

Well ... only kind of, IMO. For me, there are severe qualifications to this.

-- It doesn't surprise me that a violently patriarchial society would punish male offenders as well as female offenders in such a barbaric way. In which case, it seems to me that the female victim is colluding with the violence inherent in the system by insisting that such a horrific punishment be carried out.

-- I don't blame her for this. I blame the system, not her.

-- Of course this woman needs justice. Heck. I'm not blaming her personally for her reaction. It seems to be the only recourse for her in such a violently patriarchial set-up. But sadistic state violence of this nature is not the answer.

I mean, would it be 'empowering' for a female victim of gang rape to be able to demand that her rapists suffer the same penalty, i.e. be gang-raped themselves? My own gut reaction would be to have zero sympathy for the rapists and think they deserved everything they got -- which would be quite true. But revenge is not the same thing as justice . A desire for revenge is understandable but it's also our most base instinct. The state which enforces punishment for serious crime should rise above our base instincts and not enshrine them in law.

... One thing that has struck me in studying human rights is that the prohibition on torture and inhumane and degrading treatment is absolute. It is, strikingly, "more absolute" (if you will) than the prohibition on taking life or the prohibition on deprivation of liberty. For instance, although the death penalty remains legal under international law, torture is forbidden as an absolute, universal peremptory norm; no derogation is permitted for national security, criminal justice, or any other reason. Thus we may respond to a kidnapper/false imprisoner by locking him in a box; we may respond to a murderer by executing him. But we may not respond to a rapist by raping him, or to an acid attacker with sulfuric acid. It is a fascinating order of priorities, but one with which I tentatively agree.

Exactly.

I read an equally horrible case in Iran a few years ago, in which a convicted rapist/child molester was hanged. He was hanged slowly. It took him a long time to die, with a crowd jeering below. You know ... that is just horrible. If you believe in the death penalty, then carry it out mercifully, for God's sake. And not in front of a howling mob.

(Needless to say, I do not myself believe in the death penalty for rapists.)

[eborr]

Ner
I take issue with you on a number of points, on a narrow front I find the argument, that tribe XYZ does something, somewhere so we should respect it, because it happens to fit in with point we are trying to get across fatuous, we can find enough examples from anthropology to justify every extreme of human behaviour is we look hard enough.

I do take a western view of legal systems, and whilst they are by no means perfect, in my opinion they are far superior to most others, so no apologies for that.

As far as other forms of punishment are concerned, I find there is little merit in any other option that limitation of liberty, there may be some instances where restorative justice is appropriate, but in the 12,000 years or so when the human race has had what is considered civilisation, I would suggest we have done the Alpha through to Omega on punishment, and it's inherently clear that we have little alternative.

Of course that's from the perspective of someone who wholeheartedly disapproves of capital and corporal punishment.

It seems to me that if can tolerate the notion of capital punishment, it's not such a big step to accept the principle of mutilation. blindness, or whatever.

Of course people who argue in favour of the death penalty would like to nuance capital punishment on the grounds it has been done "humanely", on that basis if blinding or other forms of mutilation could be achieved without causing pain then doubtless that would be ok.

The Byzantines developed a technique for blindness by holding a hot poker close to the eye, which had the effect of destroying the sight without actually causing any burning.

We need to accept that some people will do really bad things to other people, and stop trying to delude ourselves that we can come up with systems that will prevent that, or even deter it. People who carry out horrible crimes cannot be reasoned with, so whatever punishment you put in place is irrelevant if you are considering it to be a detriment.

So what is the purpose of extreme sanctions, if the potential to deter is not there, is it to protect society from repeating a crime, well incarceration does that, or is it that we are seeking some form of vengeance, either on the part of the victim or the body corporate.

That is a really dangerous track to go down, and it's not somewhere I want to go.

[axordil]

It feels as if we're all dancing around a number of issues here.

One, the West has a more or less commonly agreed upon notion of what civilization entails, one which other cultures don't follow (and gain political traction from opposing, in some cases).

Two, some criminals are not likely to be rehabilitated by any means humanity currently has at its disposal. Conversely, some criminals could well be rehabilitated, if their punishment had an honest rehabilitative element to it.

Three, and this is of course related to both one and two, the purpose of criminal punishment is not only not agreed upon, but is not and cannot be monolithic--the list of things it may need to accomplish, or at least attempt, includes protective separation from society (protecting all parties concerned in many cases), recompensing society for the harm done it, deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution. To this list may be added, in cultures where it's a perceived need, implementing a divine instruction.

Even in the West, where that last item falls off the list more often than not, that's an awful lot of territory to cover with supervision, imprisonment, fines, and in the US, execution.

That's not saying I support contrapasso in jurisprudence. But I don't think I'm alone in looking for some creative thought here.

[anthriel]

There is no action that anyone can take to balance out the horror of the attack on that poor woman. Blinding that man will not make her blindness go away.

Does he deserve it? Absolutely. No question. My mom made the comment, when she heard Bin Laden had died, that she wished he could die 3000 times. Gruesome thought, but I nodded when she said it. I get it. He should have suffered as much as the suffering he caused, and a bullet to the brain was not equivalent to the horrible deaths and suffering he so willingly inflicted on innocent people. There really is no way to get around the idea that at least the classic understanding of "an eye for an eye" is all about fairness.

However....

I hope I can explain my feelings about this accurately, because they have been rolling around in my head for a while. I have been watching episodes of the series Battlestar Galactica, and was struck powerfully with one in which a humanoid Cylon had been captured (one of the beautiful Sixes) on the Pegasus. One of the punishments she received was being gang raped by members of the crew.

Now, this is a show, and I understand that. But it really hit home hard that by allowing and encouraging those men to rape that Cylon, that very human looking Cylon, there was real damage done to the men.

Perhaps she did deserve it. Perhaps she wasn't really human, so it wasn't really rape. But she certainly objected, and the Cylons looked ("and felt") completely human. So to those men, who were raping in the name of the law, they were still committing a heinous act, which had to affect them. It had to damage them, somehow, or at the very least encourage ideas and thoughts that probably shouldn't be encouraged in anyone.

Allowing or even encouraging heinous violence-- even when trying to exact justice-- damages those doing the violence. Perhaps we should consider that maybe the reason we no longer have public executions and recoil at situations like this is that we are trying to protect ourselves from becoming as bad as the criminal, from damaging our very souls, if you were, in trying to exact justice where none really can be had.

[Primula Baggins]

Anthy, excellent post. You put your finger on something that kept slipping away when I was trying to pin it down.

Yes, exactly. Society must be protected; people who do harm to other people must be prevented from doing it again and must pay some kind of penalty.

But even if the criminal's deeds were horrible and caused suffering, imposing a horrible penalty just so the criminal will suffer diminishes the humanity of the people who order it done, the people who carry it out, and to some real degree the people who accept that cruel punishment as being on their behalf.

[River]

I've had my share of chemical burns. Fortunately, I've always been near a sink and thus able to get the acid or base rinsed off before it really gets serious about reacting with my flesh and so I've been spared the lovely experience of watching my flesh carbonize (not all us chemist types are so lucky). So I get a special cringe when I read about these types of attacks. I'm not sure what has to go wrong in someone's head to make them decide it's a good idea to throw something like sulfuric acid in someone's face. That poor woman. That poor poor woman.

My half-formed thought (and it won't get better in the foreseeable future, which is why I'm offering it now): there's a difference between justice and revenge. Both redress a wrong, but the aims are fundamentally different. Justice is meant to make society itself whole again. Revenge is purely settling a score. Interpreting "an eye for an eye" literally, right down to the use of sulfuric acid, is revenge. Play the scene out in your head. The guy gets strapped down to a gurney, anesthetized, and then someone deliberately drops sulfuric acid in his eyes. Maybe they pull the lids open. Maybe they don't. You probably wouldn't need to. The acid smells of brimstone. And the eyeballs themselves... It's a scene from a horror movie. It makes nothing right.

[Cerin]

From what I have read, I have seen no reference to what brings a person to consider such a heinous crime in the first place, nor whether it is merely (hah, like anything so insane as that could be considered merely) heinous or truly insane.

I would suggest that cultural attitudes are what cause such men to consider taking such actions. It dishonors the man to have his advances refused, men must not be dishonored, especially not by women, the only way to absolve this man's shame is to make sure no one ever has the woman he wanted, and so the solution is to make sure no one ever wants her. I think the only thing unusual about this case is that TPTB cared about the woman, or about bringing the man to justice.


What would justice be in this case? I guess inflicting the same loss on him as he inflicted on her would be just. Nothing can restore her life as it would have been, but sentences aren't about restoration where that isn't a possibility. They're more about recognition, and the acceptance of responsibility. That would certainly teach the man the reality of what he had done, which might be the only thing that could give her satisfaction -- for him to understand exactly what he took from her. I think the potential harm to her, of doing that, might depend on her motivation. But certainly the more civilized approach would be to deprive him of his future through life imprisonment.

[elfshadow]

I believe strongly that Iran should not allow this punishment to occur. But I can understand why the woman would want to do it. I agree with Cerin that there were some misogynistic cultural influences at work. This man, however, must have been mentally disturbed to begin with to perpetrate such an unthinkable crime. It still makes my blood boil to think that a woman could be afraid of turning down a man's unwanted advances because he might physically disfigure her.