Man sentenced 11 years for killing unborn child shows remorse: Nice but regret should not be a mitigating circumstance
A Dutch newspaper article today leads with “Elf jaar cel voor doden ongeboren kind”, which translates as ‘Eleven year sentence for killing unborn child.’
No, it’s not a ‘run of the mill’ abortion story but yet another sordid tale of a relationship gone bad. He is a truck driver; she was seeing someone else when he was on the road. He claims she had psychological problems, wouldn’t talk to him and mistreated the other kids. So, in fact, he is saying his pregnant wife drove him crazy enough that he lost it and stabbed her fifteen times, hitting her uterus four times in the process. Crazed enough to start this attack in their home and finish it off in the street.
Now, these are the ‘facts’ mentioned in the newspaper article. Well, some facts and a lot of ‘he said’ and ’she did’ – but that is nearly always the case when it comes to the unravelling of relationships. Most people don’t end up stabbing their partners fifteen times and killing their unborn children but all of us have been through or witnessed the breaking up of (long-term) relationships. Most of the times, this does not make for a pretty sight.
Anyway, I don’t want to talk much more about this particular case. Making judgements based on a single newspaper article is seldom wise. I don’t know enough about the case, and nothing about the people involved. As I started to say, it seems to be yet another sordid story about a lethally toxic relationship, ending as still too many of them do.
What hit me though was the almost ritual mentioning that the court had considered the fact that the convicted showed remorse. (As a kind of sad, black joke the man also said he hadn’t wanted to harm the innocent child…)
I had never really considered this phenomenon before, but now the thought hit me: Why would a perpetrator’s remorse be a mitigating factor? Surely, it should mean the opposite? Let me explain. Most of us accept that you can’t punish people who are so crazy that they don’t understand the nature and consequences of the crimes they commit. In some of these cases the court declares these people unfit to stand trial.
That is also why most countries don’t prosecute children as adults: Because children can’t be expected to have developed a full understanding of their own acts and the consequences of these actions. Obviously, we are talking about a gliding scale. Some kids will be more (or less) mature in their judgements – as there are different levels of accountability for people with a history of mental problems. These are never simple matters.
Still, the premise is there – and I think it’s a sound one: That the law must take into account that not every perpetrator may be fully fit to stand trial. Meaning that you must differentiate between people who don’t and can’t know what they have done and those who are fully aware of it.
In other words, that someone, after the fact, is immediately capable of feeling a deep remorse about what he or she has done should not be seen as a mitigating factor but as the exact opposite. If a knowledge of good and wrong is part of the basis on which we judge people, then remorse is a sure sign that the perpetrator of a crime knew all along that what he or she did was, in fact, criminally wrong.
I’m not suggesting that people who show remorse in court should be sentenced more heavily than those who show indifference but I think it would be wrong to treat them with any more leniency than anyone else who was deemed fit to stand trial.
Never mind the suspicion that these tears are more informed by self-pity and self-interest to begin with: Even if these are honest tears, they do not help the victims of the crime and all they show is, truly, that even the accused accepts that what he or she did was unpardonable.
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