AP Lang Essay

The following essay does not necessarily represent my views and some parts may have been written for the sole purpose of actually being congruent with my thesis statement:


Extreme justice, inflicting the criminal’s committed crime onto the criminal, creates an injustice. Why? –Because if the criminal's original act was an injustice, then doesn’t inflicting that same act onto the criminal create just another injustice? It only makes sense then that committing two injustices cannot consummate what has been done. In concordance with Cicero’s assertion that “Extreme justice is extreme injustice”, there are many punishments that result in the opposite of their intended effect.
In The Scarlet Letter, Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale is never brought before a court and dealt justice judicially. However, without a judge’s punishment, Dimmesdale inflicts on himself a punishment through his own guilt-ridden conscience, which seems to even psychosomatically affect his health. In otherwords, there was no need for an “extreme justice” dealt by human hands because nature absolved itself. Justice can be served effectively without going to extremities, without causing two injustices.
Considering the universal truth that two wrongs do not make a right, two injustices cannot produce justice. When people stoop so low as to enforce the same act onto the criminal that the criminal themselves committed, and people do it all in the name of “justice”, are the people themselves not committing the same crime or injustice that the criminal 1st committed to deserve his sentence? -Ergo, it only makes sense that both parties, even the judicial one by trying to right an injustice, have committed injustices. If an injustice committed by a crime and an injustice committed to right an original injustice are the same act, then motive behind the acts should not matter and each is equally as evil.
Recently, there has been a controversy over whether the U.S. should be using torture techniques on terrorists. According to Cicero’s assertion, if the U.S. military does torture terrorists, even when using the excuse that “that is how they treat U.S. men”, they are still bringing about a wrong. Just because the terrorists are performing a crime against U.S. men, does not make it right for the U.S. to enact the same crimes against terrorists. The act of torturing the terrorists merely brings the U.S. down to the terrorists’ level and causes the U.S. to inflict the same injustices. If it is an injustice when committed by terrorists, it should be an injustice when committed even by the original victim (the U.S. troops).
If Cicero’s assertion is not heeded, the result is merely two criminals and two victims. Just because the population says what the wrongdoer deserves is his or her crime, does not mean that it should be called justice when the victim becomes the criminal by committing the crime against the original fugitive. It merely turns a former victim into a criminal. Re-inflicting the original wrong, no matter the person doing the inflicting, still creates a another crime –even if the re-infliction is done under the guise of “justice”.