Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of any one. For no one can judge a criminal until he recognises that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is , more than all men to blame for that crime. When he understands that, he will be able to be a judge. Though that sounds absurd, it is true. If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me. If you can take upon yourself the crime of the criminal your heart is judging, take it at once, suffer for him yourself, and let him go without reproach. And even if the law itself makes you his judge, act in the same spirit so far as possible, for he will go away and condemn himself more bitterly than you have done. If, after your kiss, he goes away untouched, mocking at you, do not let that be a stumbling-block to you. It shows his time has not yet come, but it will come in due course. And if it come not, no matter; if not he, then another in his place will understand and suffer, and judge and condemn himself, and the truth will be fulfilled. Believe that, believe it without doubt; for in that lies all hope and faith of the saints.
─ The Brothers Karamazov
What can be done
about the way the common people think of our justice? Some of them find the
mere word “trial” terrifying.
─ Crime and Punishment
Evidence! You
overlook one infinitesimal detail ─ and it builds up to a whole Egyptian
pyramid of evidence!
─ Crime and Punishment
It is almost
better to tell your own lies than someone else’s truth; in the first case you
are a man, in the second you are no better than a parrot!
─ Crime and Punishment
Out of a
hundred rabbits you’ll never make a horse, and a hundred suspicions will never
make a proof, as an English proverb
says, but that is mere common sense, and we have to try to deal with the
passions as well, the passions, because even an examining magistrate is a man.
─ Crime and Punishment
… where was it
that I read of how a condemned man, just
before he died, said, or thought, that if he had to live on some high crag, on a ledge so
small that there was no more than room for his two feet, with all about him the
abyss, the ocean, eternal night, eternal solitude, eternal storm, and there he
must remain, on a hand’s-breath of ground all his life, a thousand years, through all eternity ─ it would be
better to live so than die within the
hour? Only to live, to live! No matter how ─ only to live! … How true! Lord,
how true! How base men are!
─ Crime and Punishment
He went down quietly, without hurry; he was in a fever again, but unconscious of the fact, and full of strange new feeling of boundlessly full and powerful life welling up in him, a feeling which might be compared with that of a man condemned to death and unexpectedly reprieved.
─ Crime and Punishment
The first
question he had been concerned with ─ a long time ago now ─ was why most crimes
were so easily discovered and solved, and why nearly every criminal left so
clear a trail. He arrived by degrees at
a variety of curious conclusions, and, in his opinion, the chief cause lay not
so much in the material impossibility of concealing the crime as in the
criminal himself; nearly every criminal, at the moment of the crime, was
subject to a collapse of will-power and reason, exchanging them for an extraordinarily
childish heedlessness, and that just the moment when judgement and caution were
most indispensable. He was convinced that the eclipse of reason and failure of
will attacked a man like am illness, developed gradually and reached their
height shortly before the commission of
the crime , continuing unchanged at the moment of commission and for some time,
varying with the individual, afterwards; their subsequent course was that of
any other disease. The further question whether the disease engenders the
crime, or whether the nature crime somehow in its always being accompanied by
some manifestation of disease he did not feel competent to answer.
─ Crime and Punishment
Now you will
say: evidence. Well, suppose there is
evidence; but evidence, you know old man, cuts both ways for the most part. I
am only an investigator, and fallible like everybody else, I confess; I should
like to produce deductions that are, so to speak mathematically clear; I want
to have evidence that is like two and two make four! I want something like
direct and incontrovertible proof! But if I put a man in custody at the wrong
moment ─ even though I am sure that it was he
─ I may very likely be destroying my only means of incriminating him further; and
why? Because I shall be giving him a definite position, so to speak, I shall
give him, as it were, psychological certainty and tranquility, and once he
understands that he is definitely accused, he will retreat from me into his
shell.
─ Crime and Punishment
‘But why testify against oneself?’
‘Because only moujiks and very inexperienced
greenhorns instantly and flatly deny everything, under questioning. Any man
with even a scrap of intelligence or experience will be sure to try to admit,
as far as possible, all material facts that cannot be avoided; only he will
look for other reasons for them, turn them to reveal special and unexpected
facets, which will give them a different meaning, and place them in a new
light.
─ Crime and Punishment
‘there must
exist, I believe, a lawyer’s procedure, a legal method, applying to all sorts
of investigations, by which they begin with trivial matters, far removed from
the real subject, or even with something serious, so long as it is quite
irrelevant, so as to encourage the person being interrogated, or rather to
distract his attention and lull his mistrust, and then suddenly and
unexpectedly stun him by hitting him on the crown of his head with the most
dangerous and fatal question.
─ Crime and Punishment
Prince Myshkin: “Yes—I saw an execution in France—at Lyons. Schneider
took me over with him to see it.”
Servant: “What, did they hang the fellow?”
Prince Myshkin: “No, they cut off people’s heads in France.”
Servant: “What did the fellow do?—yell?”
Prince Myshkin: “Oh no—it’s the work of an instant. They put a man inside a frame and a sort of broad knife falls by machinery —they call the thing a guillotine-it falls with fearful force and weight-the head springs off so quickly that you can’t wink your eye in between. But all the preparations are so dreadful. When they announce the sentence, you know, and prepare the criminal and tie his hands, and cart him off to the scaffold—that’s the fearful part of the business. The people all crowd round—even women— though they don’t at all approve of omen looking on. And I may tell you—believe it or not, as you like—that when that man stepped upon the scaffold he CRIED, he did indeed,—he was as white as a bit of paper. Isn’t it a dreadful idea that he should have cried —cried! Whoever heard of a grown man crying from fear—not a child, but a man who never had cried before—a grown man of forty-five years. Imagine what must have been going on in that man’s mind at such a moment; what dreadful convulsions his whole spirit must have endured; it is an outrage on the soul that’s what it is. Because it is said ‘thou shalt not kill,’ is he to be killed because he murdered someone else? No, it is not right, it’s an impossible theory. I assure you, I saw the sight a month ago and it’s dancing before my eyes to this moment. I dream of it, often.”
Servant: “Well, at all events it is a good thing that there’s no pain when the poor fellow’s head flies off”
Prince Myshkin: “Do you know, though,” cried the prince warmly, “you made that remark now, and everyone says the same thing, and the machine is designed with the purpose of avoiding pain, this guillotine I mean; but a thought came into my head then: what if it be a bad plan after all? You may laugh at my idea, perhaps—but I could not help its occurring to me all the same. Now with the rack and tortures and so on—you suffer terrible pain of course; but then your torture is bodily pain only (although no doubt you have plenty of that) until you die. But HERE I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all — but the certain knowledge that in an hour,—then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now — this very INSTANT—your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man — and that this is certain, CERTAIN! That’s the point—the certainty of it. Just that instant when you place your head on the block and hear the iron grate over your head—then—that quarter of a second is the most awful of all.
Servant: “What, did they hang the fellow?”
Prince Myshkin: “No, they cut off people’s heads in France.”
Servant: “What did the fellow do?—yell?”
Prince Myshkin: “Oh no—it’s the work of an instant. They put a man inside a frame and a sort of broad knife falls by machinery —they call the thing a guillotine-it falls with fearful force and weight-the head springs off so quickly that you can’t wink your eye in between. But all the preparations are so dreadful. When they announce the sentence, you know, and prepare the criminal and tie his hands, and cart him off to the scaffold—that’s the fearful part of the business. The people all crowd round—even women— though they don’t at all approve of omen looking on. And I may tell you—believe it or not, as you like—that when that man stepped upon the scaffold he CRIED, he did indeed,—he was as white as a bit of paper. Isn’t it a dreadful idea that he should have cried —cried! Whoever heard of a grown man crying from fear—not a child, but a man who never had cried before—a grown man of forty-five years. Imagine what must have been going on in that man’s mind at such a moment; what dreadful convulsions his whole spirit must have endured; it is an outrage on the soul that’s what it is. Because it is said ‘thou shalt not kill,’ is he to be killed because he murdered someone else? No, it is not right, it’s an impossible theory. I assure you, I saw the sight a month ago and it’s dancing before my eyes to this moment. I dream of it, often.”
Servant: “Well, at all events it is a good thing that there’s no pain when the poor fellow’s head flies off”
Prince Myshkin: “Do you know, though,” cried the prince warmly, “you made that remark now, and everyone says the same thing, and the machine is designed with the purpose of avoiding pain, this guillotine I mean; but a thought came into my head then: what if it be a bad plan after all? You may laugh at my idea, perhaps—but I could not help its occurring to me all the same. Now with the rack and tortures and so on—you suffer terrible pain of course; but then your torture is bodily pain only (although no doubt you have plenty of that) until you die. But HERE I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all — but the certain knowledge that in an hour,—then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now — this very INSTANT—your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man — and that this is certain, CERTAIN! That’s the point—the certainty of it. Just that instant when you place your head on the block and hear the iron grate over your head—then—that quarter of a second is the most awful of all.
This is not my own fantastical opinion—many people have thought the
same; but I feel it so deeply that I’ll tell you what I think. I believe that
to execute a man for murder is to punish him immeasurably more dreadfully than
is equivalent to his crime. A murder by sentence is far more dreadful than a
murder committed by a criminal. The man who is attacked by robbers at night, in
a dark wood, or anywhere, undoubtedly hopes and hopes that he may yet escape
until the very moment of his death. There are plenty of instances of a man
running away, or
imploring for mercy—at all events hoping on in some degree—even after his throat was cut. But in the case of an execution, that last hope—having which it is so immeasurably less dreadful to die,—is taken away from the wretch and CERTAINTY substituted in its place! There is his sentence, and with it that terrible certainty that he cannot possibly escape death—which, I consider, must be the most dreadful anguish in the world. You may place a soldier before a cannon’s mouth in battle, and fire upon him—and he will still hope. But read to that same soldier his death-sentence, and he will either go mad or burst into tears. Who dares to say that any man can suffer this without going mad? No, no! it is an abuse, a shame, it is unnecessary — why should such a thing exist? Doubtless there may be men who have been sentenced, who have suffered this mental anguish for a while and then have been reprieved; perhaps such men may have been able to relate their feelings afterwards. Our Lord Christ spoke of this anguish and dread. No! no! no! No man should be treated so, no man, no man!”
imploring for mercy—at all events hoping on in some degree—even after his throat was cut. But in the case of an execution, that last hope—having which it is so immeasurably less dreadful to die,—is taken away from the wretch and CERTAINTY substituted in its place! There is his sentence, and with it that terrible certainty that he cannot possibly escape death—which, I consider, must be the most dreadful anguish in the world. You may place a soldier before a cannon’s mouth in battle, and fire upon him—and he will still hope. But read to that same soldier his death-sentence, and he will either go mad or burst into tears. Who dares to say that any man can suffer this without going mad? No, no! it is an abuse, a shame, it is unnecessary — why should such a thing exist? Doubtless there may be men who have been sentenced, who have suffered this mental anguish for a while and then have been reprieved; perhaps such men may have been able to relate their feelings afterwards. Our Lord Christ spoke of this anguish and dread. No! no! no! No man should be treated so, no man, no man!”
─ The Idiot
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