Punishment of Participating in a Murder

Abstract

In the Islamic penal institution, a specific penalty is assigned for any offence which is fundamentally based on the idea of balance between the offence and the assigned penalty. Murder is one kind of offence which is sometimes committed by an individual and sometimes by a group. The penalty for this offence is retaliation. In the case of retaliation the murder needs to be voluntary. In murders committed by individuals, the avengers of blood can retaliate the murderer or receive blood money or pardon the murderer without recompense. But in group murder, in which a group kills an individual, the penalty assigned in the Shiite juristic texts is retaliation. Nevertheless, if the avenger of the blood decides to retaliate them all, he should pay the surplus blood money for the offence. Shiite jurists have used all four sources of ijtihad, i.e., the Book, Sunna, intellect, and consensus for issuing this decree. Having reported the viewpoints of the Shiite jurists, we investigate in this study that judgment and the sources from which that judgment is inferred showing that the inferring such a judgment from the purposes derived from the Quran and hadiths is inadequate. The resulting conclusion shows that the avengers of blood cannot retaliate all of the accomplices to the murder, since exercising this retaliation is the blatant example of extravagance in murder against which God warns. Instead, the avenger chooses one of the accomplices for retaliation and the rest of accomplices pay their surplus blood money for the offence to the person who receives the retaliation. Furthermore, the principle of precaution in bloods supports this viewpoint.

Keywords

• participation in murder
• retaliation
• blood money
• avenger of blood
• pardon