Mercy - Should it be allowed?

Mercy.

What comes to your mind when you see this very word? For me, it means to have compassion and forgiveness, and maybe a tinge of leniency as well. To have mercy on someone basically means to pardon his crime, or whatever he has done wrong. So, the main topic for today is whether the law should allow mercy. In my opinion, I still feel that mercy is not the way to go in law, and it should not be implemented nor encouraged in the field of law. There are a few reasons to why I disagree with the establishment of mercy in Law, which will be further elaborated on in this blog post.

The strict system of law only revolving around "evidence" has been in place for a long, long, LONG time. Be it in our modern courts or centuries ago, the judging is all based on evidence, hard evidence. When the sentence is ruled out after analysing the evidence and deducing the person in the wrong, the person will be punished accordingly. However, in this case, if mercy was used, the person who committed the crime would be pardoned and might just take a smaller punishment for his crime. Besides, mercy has no strict regulations nor limits and if the judge was lenient on the person, he would get away with his seemingly serious crime with light punishments. That person would only be further encouraged, when he is out of jail, to once again commit crime again, as he would only think again that he would be let off easily when he gets caught.

Secondly, this might also raise issues about fairness and equality. Since mercy cannot be measured, some judges may be more lenient on some people compared to others. People might be unhappy and feel that the judges are incompetent and fail to uphold equality and be fair to everyone and give the right amount of punishment the perpetrator deserves accordingly. Upon this, the law would have failed to give the right amount of punishment to each person, when he spares the person of the punishment he was supposed to get. The other party who was the victim might not get his justice and be on the losing end when the offender is not properly and rightly punished.

However, mercy may not be all that bad, if we view it in a different light. Firstly, if there was an offender on a death sentence, his death would be inevitable and if he was a young man, his future would be gone and his life wasted at such a young age. However, if mercy was shown by the judge and he is let off and might be just jailed for 20 years, he still has his remaining life to prove himself and carve a career and live his life. And if need be, he might still contribute to the society and can even choose to go on to educate young crime offenders and teach them not no go onto the wrong path and ruin their future. This way, by sparing a person's life, it benefits many others.

However, showing mercy is easier said than done. For the law to allow mercy means that people receive different treatment in accord to the crimes. They forgo their professionalism and this might also ruin their reputation for being unfair. Thus, I feel that it is not realistic to introduce mercy in our laws as it will only lead to further complications and them being worse than the current situation.

What do you think?
Leave your interesting and constructive comments on this post!