JUNE 22 ― Some crimes deserve no forgiveness?

That is a personal choice — a difficult choice — as history is littered with heinous and unimaginable acts against humanity.

Today, we shall consider compassion even if no fortitude to can be found to forgive. As humans, we can have compassion even for the vilest.

Malaysians now soul-search over the senseless murders of T. Nhaveen and Zulfarhan Osman Zulkarnain. And months ago, Mohamad Thaqif Amin Mohd Ghaddafi.

Fifty. That’s the total of their ages. Dead at 18, in a Penang hospital bed, never to be a musician. Dead at 21, in Serdang Hospital, never to have commanded a platoon. Dead at 11, after both legs were amputated, never to play in a team coached by his ex-player father.

It’s the events which led them to hospital which boils the blood and hardens the heart to the accused.

In the corridors, I hear, of how many want to punish the alleged perpetrators, with ruthless zeal and uncompromising force.

It’s hard not to feel like that.

If I was being beaten savagely in an open field or dormitory, I would beg for my life. But to be beaten with no respite and realise the end is near, how terrible. How words fail to tell the full measure.

No one wants to be that terrified, and no one needs to be.

Most of us want to prevent it from ever happening again.

However, the death penalty is not the answer for society.

Whether on grass or along the green mile to the executioner’s room, killing of any kind is wrong.

Whether heartless boys desensitised to what pain does, or cadets with a false notion of corrective justice, or misguided ex-con, killing is wrong.

Even if it appeases an infuriated mob, because governments are not in place to please mobs, instead they are here to discourage what mobs prefer, a lynching.

They wanted burgers

Nhaveen was accosted while with a friend at a burger stand.

It has been half a year since SPM ended, but somehow these guys had a go at Nhaveen just like it was still school. Which raises the question, how much intimidation did the victim experience in school, so much so that his tormentors felt no time had passed since classroom threats?

Zulfarhan had three years in a military university. It is said the camaraderie among men in uniform is enviable because bonds are made under stress and with weapons present.

Not so much in our officers' training campus. There are conflicting stories, but when 32 young men are arrested in connection to one alleged murder, bells should ring at parade grounds.

If so many can be party, directly or indirectly, it forces the question of what kind of military leaders are being groomed in the elite school.

Is aggression not redirected using sports, unit cohesion and healthy competition, with commensurate intellectual, communications and reasoning skills training to balance brawns with brains, over there?

Thaqif was to receive early religious instruction but instead he received lashes from a steel hose.

Where does that sit with the unfettered supply of private religious schools because the highway to heaven cannot be opened soon enough, without weighing if the institutions have the human resource and facilities to serve millennial students?

How do schools unilaterally decide to hire former convicts with no childcare or psychology training, and absolve them on their own because there was no intent to harm?

Are there far more pressing questions emerging from these tragedies? It is apparent there is scant attention to violence in schools — no less to minorities —, lacking equilibrium in the training of military leaders who inherit the keys to tanks and planes, and regulating private institutions to meet common sense demands and not just acquiesce to celestial obligations.

Those intimate to those developments have a responsibility to act, but at the same time, society as a whole has to react appropriately. It is the low road to scream for the maximum punishment as a means to cover our own shame.

These things occurred during our watch.

Our need for vengeance does not remove the diseases wreaking havoc in our midst.

No blood will be shed

There are 140 countries which have turned their backs on the death penalty. A hundred years ago, it would have been difficult to find 10.

While societies, not too long ago, were convinced the death penalty was a natural extension of natural law, today advanced countries overwhelmingly reject the notion.

Nations found it philosophically inconsistent to oppose killing while being a state which sanctions killing. The arcane "eye for an eye” dictum, notwithstanding, it became impossible to inculcate respect for life if there were situations that belief can be abandoned.

Easy for them, for they have not seen horror, is a familiar rebuke to nations giving up on the death penalty.

Over here in Malaysia we have brutal slayings.

Let’s examine these nations which now disallow the death penalty for any crimes.

El Salvador is the murder capital of the world. In 1983 it banned the death penalty. It endured civil war in the 1970s and in the 80s death squads axed opponents.

Or the combination of Congo, Burundi and Rwanda in central Africa, all victims of vicious civil wars. Rwanda itself lost 800,000 lives in three months in 1994, and they oppose the death penalty.

Malaysian peacekeepers were in Bosnia, where mass graves are still being unearthed from the 1990s. They refuse the death penalty.

A history of violence encourages them to turn their back on violence, not to embrace it.

Back home

The myth that more blood will end bloodshed is a lie. It is in the denunciation of hate and violence, which ends hate and violence.

There is no reasonable level of hate, and nothing good comes from violence.

I remind myself that, for my own frailties are all there to be seen.

The most compelling argument for me is to remind Malaysians that when our state executes a person, every Malaysian is equally responsible for the act.

The state is acting on our behalf. We are executing these men, even if courts find them too horrible to describe.

The curse and blessing of being human is that we have to describe our own humanity, how we expect others to treat us and how we want to be treated, constantly.

It is not easy.

As we rue the passing of innocents — even if the most ugliest of deaths — we struggle to connect the placement of a noose around a neck as a win for humanity. Even if few will miss that neck.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.