higher than the law

At the end of the film, Detective Poirot did not hand over the murderer to the police, and I sighed softly when I saw this. And in another case at the beginning, the captain who was spotted by Poirot shot himself and his soldiers thought it was unfair because the captain was a good man (like someone defending Yao Jiaxin, who is usually a good student), Poirot asks whether it is just to damage the law. In our traditional view, Ratchett was a man of a thousand cuts, and he deserved it for being killed. This leads to the first question: Is lynching permissible? The camera returns to Istanbul before Poirot gets on the train, where both he and Marie witness how a local woman suspected of adultery dies under stones. Mary expresses difficulty in accepting it out of a woman's natural mercy, but Poirot warns that witnessing justice can sometimes be unpleasant. Good Mary was one of the twelve murderers who killed Ratchett, and she and her accomplices stabbed a full twelve times. Executing an adulterous woman with a stone is barbaric, so what are these 12 knives? Even if it seems a little less violent and cruel, it cannot change the essence of the two behaviors. Without due process of proceedings, 12 people served as the dual roles of jury and executioner. This is the greatest harm of lynching—destroying the principle of separation of powers. To exaggerate, it shakes the foundation of Western democracy. Montesquieu said that when a man is both a legislator and a judge, he has the power of tyranny. From this, it can be deduced that when a person is both a judge and an executioner, and he pursues his own law, it is unavoidable to waste his life. Europe experienced the horrors of lynching in the Middle Ages, so when Beccaria published On Crime and Punishment, it caused an unprecedented shock. The principle of statutory crime and punishment was established with great difficulty in modern rule of law and a civilized society.
Ratchett has a lot of blood and debts, and after washing the evidence, the procedure cannot be held accountable, so how can justice be realized? The second problem is much bigger than the first. It is not only a technical problem, but more like a philosophical proposition—the conflict of principles and laws, which is reasonable but illegal. Human beings make laws to build a just and orderly order, and Aristotle believed that order is a kind of justice. The formulation of punishment is said to be due to the nature of human revenge, and the early punishments were really a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye. Therefore, even if some bad people in reality do not have a bad end, they will be cursed to accept the most terrifying trial in the underground country. But how can good people see that kind of judgment, it is better to witness their punishment with their own eyes. According to the division of Western legal philosophers, the hierarchy of law from high to low is eternal law, divine law, natural law and substantive law. The written or concretely applicable rule is substantive law, which already states that people cannot use lynching. Eternal law and natural law are somewhat vague and difficult to apply directly. Therefore, Ratchett was executed. One of the murderers, the female missionary, should believe in divine law—the written will of God, such as the "Bible". The real tangle is that different believers' understandings of God's will are sometimes diametrically opposed. Jesus said: Let those who have no sin throw the first stone, and it is in this sentence that the priestess found the justification for killing Ratchett. Poirot was Catholic, and his denomination believed that all sins could be forgiven. It seems that the sages who wrote the doctrine must have had such a debate. I haven't studied criminal procedure law, so I don't quite understand the principle of statute of limitations for criminal proceedings, probably to stabilize social relations. Relaunching a case that's been going on for too long may rekindle hatred that's already fading. Of course, not every guilty person will consciously repent and atone for it.
The law is supreme, but what will happen if people's state of mind is higher than the law? I don't know, and I haven't been thinking about it all the time, and I won't easily draw conclusions in extreme situations. The only thing I know is that people who are called "damn" don't necessarily have to die to thank the people for their indignation. Just like Luo Jia in "Crime and Punishment", after killing the loan shark, she finally couldn't stand the torture of her conscience and chose to surrender herself.

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