Consider the following scenario:
Before Armin Meiwes, who had killed and eaten Bernd Brandes, was convicted to lifetime imprisonment by the Land Court of Frankfurt in 2006, his lawyers contended that the sentence should be of “killing upon request”, which would have amounted to a sentence of up to five years. Their claim was based on the fact that Brandes had agreed to be killed and eaten. Contrarily, German prosecutors claimed that due to the victim’s perturbed mental state, something that should have been known by Meiwes, he ought to be convicted of “murder” instead of “manslaughter" and face a sentence of lifetime imprisonment. It is worth noticing that neither the defense nor the prosecution had any doubts about either Brandes’ perturbed mental state or his consent to be killed.
There seems to be nothing particularly puzzling with the claim that in such a situation prosecutors and lawyers hold different opinions about the law. Their different views about how this case should be legally treated could even lead them into a linguistic exchange of the following form:
Lawyer: The …show more content…
In scenario 1), for instance, each disputant can take the term “to require” or the term “imprisonment” to mean something different from the other. If they mean different things when using the word “to require” -say, the prosecutors take the expression to mean imposing an obligation, while the defense take it to mean asserting a particular propositional content- it is easy to see how they could have come to ascertain apparently incompatible statements. Allegedly, such a difference in the way they use the relevant terms renders their disagreement about the content of law illusory. In other words, their disagreement, if any, is not about what the law requires but about what “to require”
Before Armin Meiwes, who had killed and eaten Bernd Brandes, was convicted to lifetime imprisonment by the Land Court of Frankfurt in 2006, his lawyers contended that the sentence should be of “killing upon request”, which would have amounted to a sentence of up to five years. Their claim was based on the fact that Brandes had agreed to be killed and eaten. Contrarily, German prosecutors claimed that due to the victim’s perturbed mental state, something that should have been known by Meiwes, he ought to be convicted of “murder” instead of “manslaughter" and face a sentence of lifetime imprisonment. It is worth noticing that neither the defense nor the prosecution had any doubts about either Brandes’ perturbed mental state or his consent to be killed.
There seems to be nothing particularly puzzling with the claim that in such a situation prosecutors and lawyers hold different opinions about the law. Their different views about how this case should be legally treated could even lead them into a linguistic exchange of the following form:
Lawyer: The …show more content…
In scenario 1), for instance, each disputant can take the term “to require” or the term “imprisonment” to mean something different from the other. If they mean different things when using the word “to require” -say, the prosecutors take the expression to mean imposing an obligation, while the defense take it to mean asserting a particular propositional content- it is easy to see how they could have come to ascertain apparently incompatible statements. Allegedly, such a difference in the way they use the relevant terms renders their disagreement about the content of law illusory. In other words, their disagreement, if any, is not about what the law requires but about what “to require”