justice

I was chit chatting with a friend last night and we happened to talk about the laws in Saudi (having nothing better to do) and in particular, the penalty for robbery. Now Saudi follows orthodox Islam and Saudi Law is based on the Sunnah. The punishment for robbery in Saudi is to cut off the hands of the perpetrator of the crime! This seemed to me to be extremely severe and disproportionately harsh when compared to the level of the offense committed and I mentioned it to my friend. In defense of this law, my friend said that the law is not just a punishment for the crime but is also meant as a deterrent to potential thieves. He said (without quoting actual facts and figures) that thanks to this law, the crime rate in Saudi is much lower as compared to other countries, where the law is more humane and supposedly not so ‘anachronistic’. I countered this by saying that if the primary aim of the law is as a deterrent to potential thieves, then why not the death penalty for burglary. Surely, the death penalty is a much more effective deterrent than just chopping off someone’s hands. But if the death penalty sounds too harsh and if the law is also trying to incorporate a balance between ‘just punishment’ (commensurate to the level of offence) and ‘deterrence’, then the balance in this case is very much tilted towards deterrence. In my opinion, once all details of the crime are determined and the guilt is also established beyond doubt, the law must seek to balance three components; 1) compensation to the victims of the crime, 2) punishment to the perpetrator commensurate to the nature and severity of crime (compensation to the victim is part of the punishment), 3) A further penalty to the perpetrator to act as deterrent (this could even be something like community service, it need not necessarily be monetary or corporal and need not be related to the victims of his/her act)
My friend didn’t have much to say to this. In truth, I have been in the Middle East for close to 3 years now and I was completely aware of this law. I was just trying to draw my friend into an argument to see if he could provide me with any real justification for this law. This law seems more suited to the temporal milieu of an Arabian desert of some centuries ago.