Is murder sometimes ok?

Imagine a scenario where you have murdered someone without ever believing you could, or without ever wanting to. Nevertheless, you have done it. You have done it and by some lucky chance, nobody knows. Or at least, those who do are too chicken to say so. What do you do? Who are you?

South Africa, like many other countries is home to a wide variety of criminals. Jails are teeming with too many prisoners, despite possibly too regular presidential pardons. There is simply not enough space to house criminals in our local prisons and simply not enough things to do to keep idle hands from picking up guns, knives and other people’s property.

When thinking about a criminal, I wonder who most people picture. Are they raced? Are they young or old? Are they women or men? Are they poor or simply able to take advantage of one too many loops in the system? Are all criminals the same, a set of criteria creating a proto/stereotypical criminal? Can we actually allow for the possibility in our minds that anyone is capable of committing a crime?

I’ve been trying to imagine a character for a story who has committed a crime that they didn’t see it in their own potential to commit. They commit it while not believing that they can and somehow they get away with it. Not implausible in SA sadly and in many other places. But do we forgive that person because they are not the criminal we expect?

More interesting than whom we think the criminals are is how we think they should be punished. At present as far as I understand (and not from personal experience) when you’re arrested for committing (or allegedly committing) a crime, you are commonly put in a holding cell until your bail can be posted. Is this punishment enough for some? Do we believe that the next step, a court case and then freedom or jail is a sufficient way to deal with people who flout the law?

I’m struggling because I think that there are crimes that are objectively wrong and one should never be forgiven for. Crimes that you should spend all your remaining days in a cell for or perhaps not spend any more days at all being alive. So I’m trying to work out how this character forgives itself, and how others around the character can forgive.

I’m interested then to hear what the readers think about crime and punishment — do you think we should aim for retribution or reconciliation? Should there be a death penalty? If you kill a criminal, should you be imprisoned? If you kill someone who is harming others daily, should you be imprisoned? And if we don’t imprison you, what do we do with you?

Do we think that in some cases a murder is ok?