The Illustrated Guide to Law

The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law
Chapter 6: Mens Rea
Page 1: Punishment must be deserved

The Criminal Lawyer’s Guide to Criminal Law (with pictures!)

Par 6: “I Didn’t Mean To!”

As we’ve seen, our sense that punishment must be DESERVED is very powerful. People seem to have an innate sense of JUSTICE that requires some proportionality between the offense and the resulting penalty.

In this section, we’ll start to explore just what that means.

Sullen, stubborn infant in a high chair

This sense of justice is POWERFUL. Studies have shown that even INFANTS share this desire that wrongdoers be punished, and that punishment be deserved.

(Perhaps fortunately for parents, particularly at feeding time, there’s not much they can DO about it.)

[Note, these Criminal Law chapters were originally posted as single long-form pages on Tumblr. When they were ported to this lawcomic website, they were broken up into shorter pages for easier reading and discussion.]