Legal

Do You Know The Difference?

The Merriam dictionary defines murder as “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.” This isn’t merely a definition of a word in one or more dictionaries; it’s the official description of murder in the courts of law of all nation-states worldwide.

The use of the word “unlawful” at the beginning of the definition is crucial because it diluted an act with a perspective. Laws or rules are both perspectives or viewpoints agreed upon by the people of a community or the ruling class in a country. Premeditated killing, however, is an act and it happens in the physical world independently of what you think about it or how you justify it.

By linking an act to a perspective, they produced two kinds of premeditated killings where one is considered legal, and the other is illegal. In other words, there are two types of murder: legal and illegal.

Legal murder happens continuously around you, and you hear about it daily in the news. State executions, for example, is another case of the premeditated killing of a human being. However, don’t expect them to label the state executioner as a murderer because apparently, they don’t.

On August 6, 1890, New York executed William Kemmler. It was the first time ever a state used the electric chair to carry out an execution.

The murders he commits are considered legal in the eyes of the law, which people in your state or country wrote and agreed upon. Society decided it’s okay for the state executioner to murder a human being and consequently made it a legal murder.

Rainey Bethea was the last person to be publicly executed in the United States. Bethea, who confessed to the rape and murder of a 70-year-old woman named Lischia Edwards, was convicted of her rape and publicly hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky. By the time he was executed on August 14, 1936, most of the United States had ceased executing people publicly.

The state executioner has a profession, and it’s to murder the fellow citizens of his country legally. It’s just what he does, and he does it for a living. You, actually contribute in his paycheck through the taxes you pay to your state or government. Ultimately, you support both the executioner and the law that allows him to murder people just because you are a citizen of his country.

According to Amnesty International, five nation-states continued to surpass all others in executing their prisoners in 2013:

1. China — Thousands, exact numbers unknown

2. Iran — 369 minimum

3. Iraq — 169 minimum

4. Saudi Arabia — 79 minimum

Executions around the world rose sharply in 2013, as a handful of countries executed significantly more prisoners. Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia accounted for nearly 80% of all reported executions around the world. Nonetheless, China continues to execute more people than the rest of the world combined and it is impossible to obtain accurate information because China’s use of the death penalty remains a state secret.

Credible reports suggest that once again China executed thousands of people in 2013. Chinese state officials claim that executions have decreased in recent years, but while they continue to actively hide the numbers of prisoners they kill and sentence to death, it is impossible to validate this claim.

Iranian soldiers watch a man being hanged in Shiraz, south of Tehran © AFP/Getty Images

Since the legal version of murder is a matter of perspective, the offenses that are punishable by execution varies from one country to another. In Saudi Arabia and Iran, for example, being an atheist is enough to get you executed. If you are married and committed adultery, they’ll murder you by stoning you to death. Sexual-misconduct and lesbianism are also punishable by execution.

The countries that impose the death penalty for atheism are Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

Individuals sentenced to stoning in Iran are placed in a stoning pit, buried to the neck (women) or waist (men) and others hurl stones at them until they escape the stoning pit, are incapacitated, or are dead, but because men (unlike women) are only buried to the waist, men infrequently but occasionally do escape the stoning pit, which terminates the penalty

A woman being partially buried before being stoned to death for adultery in Iran.

Same-sex relations are illegal in 72 countries, and punishable by death in eight. In Iran today, lavat (sodomy) is a capital offence and people are frequently executed for it. In Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and Mauritania, sodomy is also punishable by death.

Premeditated killing of human beings (whether in the legal or illegal version of the act) is by far the most horrific act you can do in your lifetime, and there’s nothing worse than that. You would take away everything from them, everything they ever owned, and everything they’ll ever get in the future. Furthermore, you would deprive everyone else of their existence in their lives, and this includes their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, spouses, and everyone else they ever met in their lifetime. The parents will be forced to bury their sons and daughters and live the rest of their lives without their children by their side.

This awful and ghoulish act became a matter of perspective just because they invented a word that made it so. It happened by design, and it was intended. Instead of condemning this act forever, nation-states chose to regulate it. They needed murder because it’s useful for them, so they decided to split it between legal and illegal. They need capital punishment as much as they need soldiers, where the first is used for homeland control and the latter is for satisfying territorial agendas.

If the acts of premeditated killing were condemned forever, soldiers would be all considered murderers, and the army as a whole would become an institution that trains and delivers murderers. But of course we don’t look at it that way, and we consider what they do as an act of duty and patriotism.

In 1968 US soldiers murdered several hundred Vietnamese civilians in the single most infamous incident of the Vietnam War. The My Lai massacre is often held to have been an aberration but investigative journalist Nick Turse has uncovered evidence that war crimes were committed by the US military on a far bigger scale.

“We live in a generation of emotionally weak people. Everything has to be watered down because it’s offensive, including the truth.” If I can speak honestly and unfiltered, which obviously will offend some emotionally weak people out there, soldiers just like state executioners are legal murderers by profession. It’s a legitimate job to carry on lawful murders supported by nation-states and societies in whatever country you currently live in.

Whether you stand with or against state executioners and militarized nation-states, it’s beside the point. Just don’t fool yourself by endorsing hollow labels such as “duty” and “honor” because ultimately murder is murder. It’s an act, not a perspective.

Here I can’t resist asking a very crucial question of what would the world look like if a universal and international law was introduced to classify murder (all murder) as illegal worldwide.

Will there be no armies? Will militarized nation-states become a horror tale from the past?

Will human beings subsequently stop fighting one another? Will there ultimately be peace in the world?

If we can imagine it, we can definitely achieve it.

Legal

Do You Know The Difference?

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