'Moral Bankruptcy': No Death Penalty for Lemkos's Murderer [Israel & Terrorists]

Arutz Sheva ^ | Thursday, March 25, 2015 | Yedidya Ben-Or, Ari Yashar

[Star Traveler]

Arab terrorist who murdered 25-year-old from Tekoa gets 2 life sentences, not death as demanded by family; 'this policy must change.'

The military court in Ofer Prison north of Jerusalem on Thursday sentenced the Arab terrorist who murdered 25-year-old Dalia Lemkos of Tekoa last November to two life sentences, rejecting the family's request for the death penalty.

The terrorist, Maher Al-Hashalmoun of Hevron, ran over Lemkos at a bus stop outside Alon Shvut in the Gush Etzion region of Judea before getting out of his car and stabbing her to death. He then attacked two other Israelis with the same knife, inflicting wounds before being neutralized and apprehended.

"We have decided to place two life sentences on the accused, one for the murder of the deceased and the second for his additional attempts at murder. These punishments are not enough to provide comfort for the family of the deceased, but they are enough to decry and express revulsion at the acts of the accused," read the court ruling.

[Star Traveler]

Israeli society and norms is not much for Capital Punishment. It hasn't happened for a very very long time!

[Star Traveler]

Capital Punishment in Israel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Israel

In Israel, capital punishment is allowed only during wartime and only for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, treason, and crimes against the Jewish people. The current Arab-Israel conflict is considered a war, and the committing of any of the crimes can result in the death penalty. Israel inherited the British Mandate of Palestine code of law, which included the death penalty for several offenses, but in 1954 Israel abolished the penalty during peacetime with the exception of the said crimes.

Only one person has been executed in the history of the State of Israel — Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann, who was hanged in 1962 after he was convicted in 1961 of participation in Nazi war crimes relating to the Holocaust, was the only person to have been civilly executed in Israel. Others, including Nazi criminal John Demjanjuk, have been sentenced to death but won appeals to overturn their sentences.

It is generally accepted[by whom?] that one of the reasons for Israel’s rare use of the death penalty is Jewish religious law. Biblical law explicitly mandates the death penalty for 36 offenses, from murder and adultery to idolatry and desecration of the Sabbath. Still, Jewish scholars since the beginning of the common era have developed such restrictive rules to prevent execution of the innocent that the death penalty has become de facto illegal. Conservative Jewish religious leaders and scholars believe that the death penalty should remain unused, even in extreme cases such as political assassination.

Moses Maimonides argued that executing a defendant on anything less than absolute certainty would lead to a slippery slope of decreasing burdens of proof, until we would be convicting merely “according to the judge’s caprice”. His concern was maintaining popular respect for law, and he saw errors of commission as much more threatening than errors of omission.