Summary
A 15-year-old boy was sentenced to life in prison for fatally stabbing a stranger, Muhammad Hassam Ali, after a brief conversation in Birmingham city center. The second boy, who stood by, was sentenced to five years in secure accommodation. Ali’s family expressed their grief, describing him as a budding engineer whose life was tragically cut short.
Even if you now demand a life for a life, which isn’t your call to make, it very much is possible: He might save a life that, in prison or dead, he could not have saved. He might save twenty, even a million.
You’re plain and simply out for blood. An eye has been struck out, and you hide your desire to see the whole world blind behind “well, we don’t have to poke it out, we only have to sew it shut” (put him in prison vs. executing).
Sure. He might save more lives than anyone who has ever existed. The chances of that happening are as good as winning the lottery, but hey, it could happen.
He might also take another life. Or twenty. Or a million. The chances of that are substantially higher: far more people lose the lottery than win anything at all.
The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. The best approach to playing the lottery is to lock up the money you would have used, and never let it out to buy a ticket.
If only he was now in a situation where he can be dealt with by specialists who can increase the odds substantially, and only be released if another set of specialists evaluate his mental state to have, as you put it, won the lottery.
Throw away the keys and you worsen the odds. Also, break the European Convention on Human Rights, which demands that there be a light at the end of a tunnel for everyone: Because denying it, no matter how far away it may seem, amounts to taking away his freedom to free development of personality. In other words, he has a right to work towards redemption. To, if not arrive, at least begin to learn to walk into the right direction. Everybody does.
Who are you to make a judgement on the future of his life while the blood on the knife hasn’t even dried yet? Can you predict the future? Make a judgement for the here and now, instead.
He can study necromancy for the rest of his life, and attempt to raise his victim from the grave. That’s his right. If he accomplishes it, we can talk about clemency.
His right to seek redemption isn’t being infringed upon by locking him up permanently. It is the permanence of the death he caused that is denying him redemption.
One comment earlier you seemed to have accepted saving a life as possible repayment for a taken life, now you don’t, any more. What happened?
I commented on it, but I never accepted your premise that saving lives counts toward redemption. The reason why is simple: Whatever future potential you envision this kid having, you must also give to the kid he killed. Balancing the number of potential future lives the murderer saves vs the same number of potential lives lost by killing his victim, this kid is always going to be one life short of redemption.
Edit:
Forgot to comment on this earlier:
No, by locking him up forever, you greatly improve the odds that he won’t kill again. He is free to explore the development of his personality within the context of having his behavior directly supervised for the rest of his life.
No, he isn’t. Literally psychology 101. You’re dooming him, how are you going to redeem yourself from that? You’ll need, by your own argument, do something that benefits him, not others, or the collective.
He doomed himself. I don’t owe him a thing. If I owe anyone anything, it is his victim, not him. If I do owe his victim, locking up his killer for the rest of his life would be my pathway toward redemption.
You locked him up and threw away the key. That is your action, directly affecting his psychology, directly harming him. You may be the judge, the legislator, the juror, the jailer, the voter. You have to account for it.
You justify locking him up by protecting others, but how do you justify the harm you’re inflicting?
Then, you’re assuming agency on his part. Choice. The kid is 15 FFS, go back in your own life, consider how much, at that age, it was yours, or that of the environment. You also need to argue that he was the reason he killed, and not his environment. Humans don’t generally kill other humans, they also don’t grow up to do so, something must’ve happened to him and I very much doubt it was his fault.