Around this time last year, a 9 year old girl and her 4 year old brother were kidnapped on their way to a tuck shop to buy sweets, but they didn’t make it back home. The little boy was returned, after an extensive search, by three unknown men. When questioned, the boy said that his sister had been murdered.
They found her body a few days later, one of her eyes had been gauged out and her genitals were hacked off. With widespread speculation that this was a muti killing, the local inhabitants flew into a frenzied rage and wanted to torch the house of the people they thought were responsible.
Police were called in to prevent the burning down of the house, with the people still inside. They had to use stun grenades on the mob. There was also no proof that these were in actual fact the guilty parties or just innocent residents living in the wrong place at the wrong time. It also didn’t help that they were relatively well off and people in the area thought they made their money selling body parts.
As far as I know the police never caught the guilty parties.
Do you think there are times when mob justice is right? Or should we simply wait for our incompetent police force to do their jobs?
No I don’t think mob justice is right. As a lawyer I have a high regard for rule of law. What happens if the mob was wrong? Should innocent people die on a whim? If they kill the wrong person and later on they find out that they were wrong, how exactly do you make that right? Maybe these people are just jealous of the richer folks. It is not the first time in human history people have used execuses to take from the “rich” so they can have more.
Let the government find and punish the right people.
Certainly there times and instances where it FEELS like “somebody has to do something cuz the cops sure aren’t” – but no, I can’t justify mob justice. As faulted and slow as it is, the judicial system and everyone’s right to a fair trial is the right and free country way to do things, my opinion, as well as the opinions of our founding fathers.
This is such a sad and horrible story. However, I think it’s too easy for mob justice to get out of control and go after the wrong people.
Jane Kennedy Sutton
http://janekennedysutton.blogspot.com/
Mob just is based on the faulty principle that it is better that the innocent should suffer than that the guilty should escape.
Someone recently commented on my blog that such acts were those of “sub-human” savages, but they pale into insignificance when compared with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was mob justice using all the resources of the state — yet the underlying motive was precisely the same: someone must suffer for this, whatwever “this” is, and the mob doesn’t particularly care who.
It is very sad to learn that mob justice can be perpetrated by young people. am concerned becauase one has to answer one day why he participated in such killings.
Am a youth activist who value life. whether one is right or wrong let the rule of law take place and these people will be punished. For witchcraft related deaths personally i do not want to dispute that these exist or not but the fact is where is the evidence? can i be shown p[ictures of a mutilated body where private parts are not there?
Hi Jacob,
There is plenty of evidence that these Muti killings are happening all over Africa, just ask the police or dig around on the internet, read a newspaper. This isn’t some made up story, it’s a reality!