Let me teach my child that life is not simply about crime and punishment
Umar Mukhtar
I live in a country that will never be the most powerful in the world, nor richest, nor the most beautiful nor the most law-abiding. There are some things out of our hands. But the some things within our control, like being the most compassionate or the most charitable, we can always dream we are the most.
That is why I read with dismay when a fellow citizen, a young unemployed man of nineteen, who had pleaded guilty to be a first offender in insulting someone in contravention of a law, was given the maximum sentence of one-year imprisonment.
What happened to us? Are we that eager to please the law that we have lost the compassion to consider that it was his first offence and that he had saved the court’s time in avoiding a full trial by pleading guilty? We are blind to whatever his circumstances are in our eagerness to follow the letter of the law? Is that how we treat a fellow human being who is completely at our mercy?
I do not mean to insult anyone and I am a law-abiding citizen but I feel it is incumbent upon us to speak up and plead on his behalf that this country was founded on the basis of human compassion. His crime was not snatching handbags of the weak and the old that may result in hurt or death. He was not pushing drugs. He did not rob nor endanger people’s lives. He insulted someone whom cannot be insulted, and he goes to jail for a year!
The other offences I mentioned carry far heavier sentences but somehow not everybody gets the maximum punishment. In fact, some got less than this fellow citizen of mine. As a legally trained person, I respect the court’s discretion in giving out a maximum sentence as much as I understand and bite my tongue when courts meted out punishments less than what I expected.
In this holy month of Ramadhan, a show of compassion goes a long way. Let us show each other that a thing not out of our hand like compassion is something we can be proud of. I want to show my kids that compassion does not hurt anyone, rather than to strut around showing that we have no qualms in exercising maximum punishment as if our manhood depends on it or our eagerness to please the law overrides everything else.
If I can charge ten ringgit for every time I was insulted, especially my intelligence, when I am thought a fool by some cock and bull officialdom stories, I would be a rich man today! This fellow citizen of ours deserves a second chance. If we don’t understand the need for that then we’ll never understand why some people are stupid enough to be suicide bombers and take drugs and the like. Thank god he is normal.
