Declare him an Outlaw.

Declare him an Outlaw
This is Salah Abdeslam who is the eighth gunman in Paris. The civilised world should declare him an outlaw.
salah.jpg
Long ago if a person was declared an outlaw then he was withdrawn all legal protection, so that anyone was legally empowered to persecute or kill them. Outlawry was thus one of the harshest penalties in the legal system. In those early times in northern Europe the death penalty was quite conspicuously absent, and outlawing is the most extreme punishment, presumably amounting to a death sentence in practice. It was more than that, it was a living death because the outlaw was outside of everything that mattered in life, the milk of human kindness, the comfort of home and friends, the solace of the church, and food, water, & wine. He was dead, he was lonely, it was awful, the ultimate punishment for the most heinous act.
When one examines this process I find one thing stands out and that is that the outlaw had clearly chosen to perpetrate that heinous act and understood its consequences. In effect the person had chosen his fate - it was not society, he had denied that society and therefore all it provided and placed himself outside.
What society had offered was based upon the most basic concept of Christianity i.e. love of humanity -  Aquinas and Aristotle would endorse this, natural law would support that.
In England, not only was the subject deprived of all legal rights of the law being outside of the "law", but others could kill him on sight as they would a dangerous animal..
Make no mistake, being declared an outlaw was awful. It was not the glamourous Robin Hood depicted by Hollywood, it was a lonely living death, the ultimate deprivation, with the inevitability of destruction and oblivion.
The advent of Magna Carta in 1215 did change the concept of being declared an outlaw by the introduction of Habeas Corpus and due process but [and it is an important but,] the perpetrator of the crime was required to appear before a court. He was summoned to do so. Failure to respond and then he was declared an outlaw.
This process was noted in folklore, when I was a child in the 1940’s we spoke in hushed fearful tones of an individual “being summonised!” We were not sure of what it meant but we did know that if the ‘summons’ did not get response the consequences were going to be very serious. And so it was we spoke of some local criminal getting this summons from the police.
What is needed now is for Salah Abdeslam, and all who practice, or try to undertake, terrorism, to be declared outlaws. Terrorism is simply defined it is the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. Go back to the original concept and application of declaration of being an outlaw. Ultimate death.  



 



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