Mirror punishment

Common card · No. 426544

A mirror punishment is a penal form of poetic justice which reflects the nature or means of the crime in the means of (often physical) punishment as a form of retributive justice—the practice of "repaying" a wrongdoer "in kind". It can be an application of the lex talionis (“an eye for an eye”), but is not always proportional justice, as a similar method may be used to produce a worse or milder effect than the crime for which it "retaliates". The simplest method of mirror punishment is to enact the same action upon the criminal as the criminal perpetrated upon the victim. For example, thieves have the same amount of money taken from them as they stole, one who strikes another is struck in the same way, one who willfully causes another person's death is killed, and so on. Often, however, a more esoteric method of mirror punishment is used, which implies punishing the part of the criminal's body used to commit the crime. Examples include the amputation of the hands of a thief, as permitted...

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