Judicial punishment can never be administered merely as a means for promoting another good, either with regard to the criminal himself or to civil society, but must in all cases be imposed only because the individual on whom it is inflicted has committed a crime.[1] For one man ought never to be dealt with merely as a means subservient to the purpose of another, nor be mixed up with the subjects of real right. He must first be found guilty and punishable, before there can be any thought of drawing from his punishment any benefit for himself or his fellow citizens. The penal law is a categorical imperative and woe to him who creeps through the serpent windings of utilitarianism to discover some advantage that may discharge him from the justice of punishment or even from the due measure of it. According to the pharisaic maxim: ‘It is better that one man should die than that the whole people should perish.’
However, the mode and measure of punishment which public justice takes as its principle and standard is just the principle of equality, by which the pointer of the scale of justice is made to incline no more to the one side than the other. It may be rendered by saying that the undeserved evil which any one commits on another, is to be regarded as perpetrated on himself.
[1] Emmanuel Kant
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Post Contributed By:
Souradeep Rakshit
Asst. Prof. of Law
IILS, Dagapur
