THEY KILL FOR HIRE—WHY DO WE KILL?
The practice of assessing conduct by the neighborhood returns
They kill, serve some prison time, and kill again
The practice of assessing conduct by the neighborhood returns
THEY KILL FOR HIRE—WHY DO WE KILL?
They kill, serve some prison time, and kill again
“abc”
One of the alleged assailants in the shocking attack, carried out with an antitank weapon against two young people in Tirana a few days ago, was, according to the police announcement, “previously convicted of the crime of murder.”
We have also encountered, in other cases, the standard formula issued by the police authorities, according to which the killer was “previously convicted of murder.” In other words, people with criminal tendencies who have committed a serious crime such as murder have been sentenced so leniently—or to so little time—that during their imprisonment they were “in a holiday camp,” since they got out in the blink of an eye. Moreover, taking advantage of the leniency shown by our justice authorities, they committed new murders.
In cases like these, when the killer is a repeat offender or a professional, released after spending several years or just a few months in prison, the citizen—unprotected from the criminals swarming our streets as a result of the breakdown of the extreme justice system—wanders in fear.
Why are criminals released so easily? There may be various answers. But even this “little diary”—that is, the fact that “the killer had previously been convicted of murder”—may give anyone an idea of the level of corruption in the justice authorities. This impression is inadvertently reinforced by an announcement made in recent days, according to which Prosecutor’s Office officials have decided that a “conduct record” should be obtained for every defendant. Under this arrangement, neighborhood elders can intervene to have a murderer or thief released because, supposedly, the latter behaved well in the neighborhood, with him and his beloved! We believe that such liberal practices have nothing in common with “mitigating circumstances,” a legal category that the court must take into account when determining a sentence. Likewise, such practices are far removed from the court’s proper assessment of the defendant’s true character, which is also a sound legal requirement.
In these circumstances, “certificates of good conduct,” issued without hesitation for criminals of every kind, together with their brazen defense in the courtroom—challenging the prosecution, even in the case of professional killers—realistically demonstrate the pressure exerted on our judicial system in many different ways, including criminal means, with the aim of stripping it of the force of law. Creating such “mitigating circumstances” for criminals, which has resulted in more murderers being outside prison than inside it, does not reduce crime; on the contrary, it has encouraged it. In these circumstances, even “contract killers” have appeared on the scene—people we had thought were a foreign phenomenon in Albanian society.
If we are not mistaken, someone once said that there are no more than 1,000 people serving sentences in our prisons, whether they are murderers, thieves, and so on. In Greece, as far as we know, the number of Albanians serving various sentences is several times greater. The same is true in Switzerland. This is also because, among other reasons, in these countries with well-established democratic traditions, murderers are not pampered; on the contrary, they are punished severely.