It may be said that the fact of the man’s anger is as much a motive as
any other and should have no influence on the legal side of the
incident. Though this is quite true, we are bound to consider the crime
and the criminal as a unit and to judge them so. If under such
circumstances we can say that this unit is an outcome natural to the
character of mankind, and even if we say, perhaps, that we might have
behaved similarly under like circumstances, if we really cannot find
something absolutely evil in the deed, the criminal quality of it is
throughout reduced. Also, in such smaller cases the fundamental concept
of modern criminology comes clearly into the foreground: “not the crime
but the criminal is the object of punishment, not the concept but the
man is punished.” (Liszt).
The fact of the presence of a significant irritation is important for
passing judgment, and renders it necessary to observe with the most
thorough certainty how this irritation comes about. This is the more
important inasmuch as it becomes possible to decide whether the
irritation is real or artificial and imitated. Otherwise, however, the
meaning of the irritation can be properly valued only when its
development can be held together step by step with its causes. Suppose I
let the suspect know the reason of suspicion brought by his enemies,
then if his anger sensibly increases with the presentation of each new
ground, it appears much more natural and real than if the anger
increased in inexplicable fashion with regard to less important reasons
for suspicion and developed more slowly with regard to the more
important ones.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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