Disproportionate Retribution/Real Life

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • It is widely held by modern historians that the Lex Talionis ('an eye for an eye') arose as a way of limiting retribution, which otherwise could cause an escalating cycle of vendetta.
  • A woman murdered her teenage son and daughter for mouthing off at her.
  • A boy who was given nothing to drink as punishment for wetting the bed died from dehydration. Seen here.
  • A 3-year-old girl froze to death after her mom and her mom's boyfriend locked her in a bedroom and left the window open when it was minus 30 degrees outside. Her younger sister was also punished in the same fashion, but thankfully did not die (but she did suffer from hypothermia). Why did the girls receive such fierce punishment? They wet their beds.
  • Wasps. They will sting you if you make them angry. Unfortunately, unlike their relative, the nicer-by-comparison bee, a wasp's stinger never breaks off, which means it will stab you repeatedly if it wanted to.
  • Gaius Julius Caesar was once kidnapped by pirates. What seemed to offend him most was the way they treated him- not too bad, but not as well as he thought they should, and he actually spent a lot of time bossing them around. One thing that really annoyed him was the fact that they asked for a ransom for his release- he thought the ransom was too low and demanded they raise it. He promised that when he got free he would kill every last one of them ... and he did. As soon as he could he mustered up a force that captured them all and then arranged to have them crucified. The local governor thought this was a bit harsh and lessened the sentence to slavery, but Caesar went behind the governor's back and oversaw the crucifixions personally. As an act of mercy, their throats were slit. Generally speaking, Caesar was forgiving of Roman enemies, but non-Roman citizens who he felt slighted him were in for a world of pain.
    • It's written that Caesar said he'd do it in jest, but he was a man of his word, so...
    • It's possible Caesar considered himself their guest (as insane as that sounds considering he was kidnapped) and expected to be treated as such (very well, especially given his station). Going from the retribution (execution), while insane by modern standards, would be somewhat more normal for the time (hospitality was a big deal in the Classical World) if still harsh.
      • Ransoming nobles was a very different thing in ancient times. So long as you treated your captive decently and ransomed them for an acceptable price you would not only receive your ransom, you would be considered generous and merciful for doing so (rather than executing them). Failure to treat a captive noble well would probably result in war if the grieved party was capable of it.
      • Piracy was seen as a major problem in the Mediterranean at the time, and for a "foreigner" to kidnap a Roman nobleman was considered a major crime against Rome in and of itself, and crimes against Rome (or perceived crimes against Rome, or imagined crimes for that matter) never went without disproportionate retribution. Let's face it, whole wars have, throughout time, started for the most petty reasons, because not everyone saw war as something to avoid.
  • Some sources say that Empress Livia (the wife of Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome) made it illegal, and punishable by exile or death, to say nasty things about her.
  • There is a story about George Gordon, the Lord Byron, that when he attended Trinity College, they wouldn't let him bring any of his pet dogs. So he brought a trained bear. Imagine Byron coming back from his winter break, riding bearback through the gates and off into the sunset...
  • Unfortunately real. In Thailand, it is a crime to insult, threaten, or defame the monarch, Regent, or heir. A Swiss man was jailed for going on a drunken graffiti spree on images of the king (he was later pardoned by the king himself), and currently an Australian is facing up to 3 years in prison for writing a novel Verisimilitude that featured a fictional prince with marital problems. The passage was claimed by the judge to be slander in that it claimed that the royal family, ironically, was abusing its royal power.
    • Not to mention said Aussie was writing for The Economist at the time. So what does the royal family do? Ban all sales of The Economist, and also subtly suggest there's a ban on publicly showing past issues as well.
    • In 2001, a youthful protester hit the King of Sweden with a pie. Instead of being charged with assault or a similar crime, he was formally charged with "Lese Majeste" Thankfully, this one is more a case of Disproportionate Charges than Disproportionate Punishment, since the punishment was a $300 fine.
    • In 2007, a video appeared on YouTube that mocked King Bhumibol Adulyadej by depicting him as an ape while the Thai national anthem plays, the final scene showing a pair of feet over a photograph of his face (feet are considered unclean in Thailand, and for the soles of one's feet to face another person is a rude gesture; Thais usually sit with their feet pointing away from others). The video was deemed insulting to the king, and after members of the military junta governing Thailand claimed that the video was an attack on both the country and the monarchy, YouTube was blocked from all Thai IP addresses, as well as several of the blogs reporting this story. Since then, YouTube has been unblocked, but only after the establishment of a national gateway to block all web content that insults the monarchy. The aforementioned video features text describing another case of Disproportionate Retribution after lèse majesté, described above.
      • Nearly the same thing happened in Turkey as well due to videos insulting Ataturk. Youtube is still banned there.
  • Indonesia's drug laws were the subject of criticism for disproportionate retribution when Schapelle Corby faced the death penalty after being discovered with four kilos of dope, which she claims were planted on her. More than one country in Southeast Asia still maintains a death penalty for drug possession, let alone actual trafficking.
    • Prohibition in general has thrown out some shocking examples of this. In the USA, for example, there have been numerous cases of DEA agents shooting unarmed innocents dead during raids, and countless stories of people's futures being ruined because of a possession conviction in their youth.
  • Some theories that this, through a serious warping of existing cultural values, helped enable the Khmer Rouge to commit genocide in Cambodia. In short, there's a long history of disproportionate retribution stories in Cambodian history (for example, one tale has a king ordering the death of not just the murderer but the murderer's extended family by up-to-the-neck burial and decapitation with a plow after the murderer kills someone who had impressed the king), and the KR won popular support for their rebellion by appealing to the view that those being killed had been complicit in keeping the common people down. Something along the lines of "They are the enemy, they have hurt you, so kill the hell out of them."
  • There was a story in the news years ago about a man who felt that his wife hadn't given him enough sympathy when his father died, so he had a baby with her, waited a year or so to make sure she'd developed an emotional bond with it, and then murdered it. Here it is.
  • Amputation is on the low end of the brutality of historical judicial systems. Before the creation of prisons in the 19th century, all punishments had to be instant - compensation, physical torment, execution, banishment, something in that vein. As well, a low regard for the fate of criminals led to punishments that most today regard as utterly barbaric - for example, 222 crimes carried the death penalty in Britain in 1815, including stealing an animal or cutting down a tree. Many nations that rely on Islamic law retain cutting off the hand of a thief as it's mentioned in the Qur'an.[1]
    • Actually historians think that the amount of capital offences in Britain could have easily been well over 300 and don't know the exact number of them.
    • To put 19th century Disproportionate Retribution into perspective, one European traveler visiting the United States sometime after the Jacksonian period was actually deeply surprised that rape was one of the few crimes still punishable by death in the young Republic. But back in Europe, rape wasn't even CLOSE to being one of the numerous capital crimes.
  • As detailed in Bill Bryson's book Down Under (AKA In A Sunburned Country), Australian primary school history some of the unfortunates who were members of the first British penal colony in Australia were shipped off into a life of permanent exile for mindboggingly petty offences: stealing ribbons, a book, or few cucumber plants. Transportation was at the time also deemed equivalent in weight to a death sentence - any crime for which you could be transported was a capital crime. Criminal punishments were bizarrely disproportionate at the time: one jury famously refused to convict a man of stealing a silk handkerchief if it meant he would be transported or killed so found him guilty of a lesser crime instead - manslaughter. (The fine was sixty shillings.)
  • In the Revolutionary War, four of the six Iroquois Nations participated in raids on various backwoods settlements, including one particularly nasty one at Cherry Valley. General George Washington's angry response? Send a division into the Iroquois land, kidnap every woman and child, kill every warrior, burn every Iroquois village, and listen to no pleas for mercy or peace until the land is ruined. It worked, and the Iroquois, once a frontier empire unto themselves, were finished as a military - or any other kind of- power.
    • Considering some of the things the Iroquois did to their enemies, whether they be other Native tribes or white colonists, one wonders if Washington's response (as brutal as it was) was really all that disproportionate.
  • On a more personal level, the concept of Western dueling falls under this trope. Effectively, if a man felt his honor/lady/family/country/anything remotely attached to him was slighted (even on a scale that today we would find trivial), he was socially (if not legally) within his rights to challenge the offender to a fight to first blood, until honor was satisfied, or even to the death. The duels usually involved swords or guns, but could also include other weapons, including bare fists. This remained legal in some countries until the late 1800's. There was even a book with rules on the subject (the Code Duello). It got so bad at times General Washington was forced to encourage his officers to refuse duels, as he was losing too many (officers). One of the more ridiculous examples had two Frenchmen, each in hot-air balloons, attempting to shoot down his rival's balloon with pistols.
  • In August 1940, a German bomber missed the airfield it was intending to bomb, and dropped its bombs on suburban London instead. The British launched a retaliatory bombing raid against Berlin the next night, which killed 10 people. Hitler's response? 57 consecutive days of strategic bombing against London (and other cities to a lesser extent), killing more than 43,000.
    • Ironically, this may have led to the German defeat in the Battle of Britain, as the switch from bombing airfields to bombing cities gave the RAF a much-needed reprieve from the enormous amount of pressure previously put on it in terms of aircraft, pilots, and airfields.
    • The Nazis often killed many "hostages" if Jews escaped from the ghettos or concentration camps, or if partisans killed German soldiers, in order to show that such tactics would not be worth the human cost.
    • When the British SOE killed Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi retaliation was brutal. About 13,000 people were arrested, deported, imprisoned, or killed. All males over the age of 16 in the village of Lidice, and another village, Ležáky, were murdered. The towns were burned and the ruins leveled.
    • A similar event occurred in Telavåg, Norway. On April 26, 1942, after having discovered that some of the inhabitants the village were hiding two men from the Linge company (Norwegian Resistance) Arne Meldal Værum and Emil Gustav Hvaal, the Gestapo arrived to arrest the Norwegian officers. Shots were exchanged, and two prominent German Gestapo officers were shot dead. The Nazi response was to destroy all buildings, sink/confiscate all the boats, take all livestock, and execute all the males or send them to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. Of the 72 who were deported from Telavåg, 31 were murdered in captivity. Women and children were imprisoned for two years.
  • A British schoolteacher teaching in Sudan faced forty lashes in 2007. Her crime? Allowing a class to name a teddy bear Mohammed. Thousands of protesters were demanding her execution. Luckily the British government intervened.
    • The really sick thing about that was the teacher didn't even name the bear after the Prophet - the bear was named after one of the kids in her class.
    • As bad as this was, the event led to another form of disproportionate retribution. In short, South Park parodied this in their (in)famous "Mohammed" episode where, after making a big deal out of the Prophet appearing at all (Flashback: the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons), he shows up in a bear suit. The response from the Muslim world? Trey Parker and Matt Stone ending up on a Jihad website's hit list.
  • This story about a senior student being denied his diploma and by extension, graduation... only because he blew a kiss to his family.
  • Griselda "The Godmother" Blanco would kill anyone and their families who owed her money, which the other drug lords found to be extremely stupid ("The Mafia would beat debtors half to death; they'd be in the hospital but still alive to pay the next time.")
  • A firefighter tried to stop a man from riding his bike on a busy road with his three-year-old in the back seat. By shooting at him [dead link].
  • A very alarming and unusual example happened in Granby, Colorado, when one Mr. Marvin Heemeyer used steel plating and concrete blocks to convert a bulldozer into a battle tank, complete with more than a foot of armor, video cameras so he could see what was going on from inside and semi-automatics to shoot stuff. He then took this new toy on a joyride, blowing up (among other things) the Town Hall, the office of the local newspaper that editorialized against him, and the home of a former judge's widow. He only stopped when the machine conked out and he committed suicide. The reason for this rampage? A concrete plant was going to be set up next to his business and he felt it would cause problems for him.
    • To clarify, the local authorities had been trying for years at that point to oust him from his property with underhanded tactics, including allowing the construction of a building that blocked off the main entrance of his store. Still disproportionate, but it's less of a wonder the man eventually went bonkers.
    • In New Hampshire, a man named Carl Drega went on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge for much the same reasons---years and years of being treated like a Butt Monkey by the local authorities. When some cops pulled him over for having rust holes in his pickup truck's bed, that was it...WhosLaughingNow
  • In 1955, Emmett Till, a black teenager who lived in Chicago, was kidnapped by two men beaten and shot. When his body was found, it was mutilated beyond recognition. What did he do to deserve this? He supposedly whistled at a White lady.
  • In the 1970s, a woman named Paulette Cooper wrote an expose critical of the Church of Scientology called The Scandal of Scientology. The result? A decade-long campaign of psychological terror culminating in a plot to impersonate Cooper and issue death threats in her name to Henry Kissinger.
  • It's not always bad though. The creators of South Park made "Cartoon Wars", a two-parter bashing Family Guy for being crap. Why? Because fans of South Park would tell them that they were fans of Family Guy too. That's it. Which is not even something that's within the control of Family Guy and its creators, right? People will like what they like. Although the Family Guy staff would agree that the retribution was pretty disproportionate (considering their production schedule didn't allow for a proper and timely response), they (like everyone else) thought it was hilarious. They even have gone so far as to refer to cutaway gags as "manatee jokes" in reference to how South Park portrayed the Family Guy writers.
  • A man in San Francisco believed that his sister and her husband were "too liberal, were raising their children wrong and because they hadn't invited him over for Christmas". His response? Murder them in front of their children, then try to adopt the kids himself. He still believes he was justified. The article is here.
  • According to this a graffiti tagger was sent to jail for eight years.
  • The Emperor Yong Le, third Emperor of Ming China, usurped power from his nephew and asked one of the former Emperor's advisors to write his inaugural address in order to legitimize his rule. Out of loyalty to the deposed Emperor and staunch adherence to Confucianism, the advisor absolutely refused, in spite of threats to his well-being. Eventually, Yong Le made a rather extreme example of him and killed him, along with his entire extended family and all of his students and peers, totaling nearly 900 people.
  • In France during the Industrial Revolution, repeated smuggling of cotton textiles was a capital offense (the wool merchants union had a strong lobby)
  • Are you a North Korean citizen? Do you want to leave the country and make a better life for yourself? Has a family member of yours left the country to try to make a better life for themselves? Do you think your students should have more time to study? Do you think that dump you just took looks like Kim Jong-Il's supposed birthplace, Mt. Baekdu? Have you been modifying the radio the state gave you to listen to South Korean soap operas? Well, guess what, your ass and two generations of your family are being sent to work for at least several years at a concentration camp. (People have been punished for every example mentioned, by the way.)
  • A 12-year-old girl gets arrested, as in taken to the station in handcuffs arrested, in New York City for... doodling on her desk. With an erasable marker.
  • In Littleton, Colorado, a 19-year-old was arrested because of an overdue DVD he hadn't returned to his local library. Story here.
  • A 17-year old kid in China gets stabbed in the head by a group of gamers for cheating at Counter-Strike. He survived, fortunately.
  • In the Philippines, a guy was shot for being a bad karaoke singer.
    • More common than you'd think. "My Way" is pretty dangerous when sung here, since it invites drunkards stabbing you for being terrible at singing it.
  • Robert-François Damiens. Poor, poor Robert le Diable. Crazy guy, Catholic fanatic, a few cookies short of a jar, decided it would be awesome to assassinate Louis XV in 1757. His brilliant plan consisted of "go up to the royal carriage and leap out at ol' Louis le Bien-Aimé with a knife." Needless to say, the plan was flawed, and Damiens succeeded only in giving the king a scratch. He made no attempt to escape and was immediately arrested, tortured, and executed by the unbelievably gruesome French version of drawing and quartering, which hadn't been practiced since the Middle Ages and which even the king was loath to inflict; its name is deceiving, since it involves not only drawing and quartering (with a team of HORSES) but also torture with red-hot pincers, molten lead, burning sulfur, and burning at the stake. When Damiens heard what was going to happen, he said, "The day will be hard." After his death, his house was razed to the ground, and his family was banished from France.
  • Turkey's Article 301 makes it illegal to insult the Turkish nation, culture, or governmental bodies. The government uses this to punish virtually anyone who states that Armenians have been victims of a genocide (namely, the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923, itself an example of Disproportionate Retribution). Turkish citizens living outside of Turkey are punished more severely.
  • Funnily enough, the laws for self-defence in the United Kingdom seem to prevent this in that it can only be classified as self defence if your defence was proportionate to (or less than) the attack: one could argue that you cannot run over a man who is attempting to punch you, nor can you call in an airstrike on someone coming for you with a switchblade.
    • The law is quite a bit more complicated than that - for instance, a man was sent to jail for eight years for killing an intruder armed with a handgun (with a sword). However, the defendant in question was a cannabis grower and drug dealer, so the judge ruled that the motives for his own self-defence were not as worthy - he was clearly under the belief that he was part of "hit", and so since he was acting to preserve his own position in the criminal underworld, he received a far stiffer sentence. An ordinary householder in the same position would receive a much more lenient sentence (if they were sentenced at all). Ultimately, the proportionality of any self-defence is decided by a jury.
  • In his book on the group, Hunter S. Thompson notes that this was a feature of the Hell's Angels private code of justice: total retaliation against anyone who messed with them. Also, if an Angel and a non-Angel are having a dispute, other Angels automatically side with the former. Thompson discovered this first hand when he told off an Angel for domestic abuse, saying "Only a punk beats his wife." - they proceeded to beat ten shades of hell out of him, ending his association with the group.
  • ZD and ZT
  • Zero-tolerance policies regarding weapons in schools.
    • Not just weapons, but also "drugs" in the loosest sense of the term. Students have been suspended for carrying such "dangerous substances" as aspirin, Midol, and mouthwash.
      • There is a case where a kid got suspended for carrying insulin. Or freaking labeled a drug dealer on their permanent record for glucose tablets. That's as dangerous as candy.
  • Colombian soccer player Andres Escobar was shot dead upon returning home from the 1994 World Cup. His crime: scoring an own goal.
    • The Nigerian team of 2010 were suspended for two years by their country's FA for going out in the group stage (They lost to Argentina and Greece and drew with South Korea).
  • In 1988, Salman Rushdie wrote a novel called The Satanic Verses, which contained certain references that members of the Muslim community found offence. The official response from the Ayatollah of Iran was to issue a fatwa calling on 'every good Muslim' to kill Rushdie and his publishers. The overall result was Rushdie being forced to live in hiding under conditions of heightened security for over ten years and, while he has not to date been harmed, at least 38 people are believed to have been murdered in connection with the book.
    • Similarly, in 2004 the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam in broad daylight for having collaborated with Somali-born activist and MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the short film Submission, which criticised the treatment of women in Islam. Hirsi Ali was forced to flee the country and to this day must live with police protection.
      • Uhmm... one of his many criticism included that the Dutch government was protecting Muslims, a lower form of life that demanded respect while assaulting children with poison gas, diseases, and atomic bombs. Another one was that he didn't need any protection because they were too inept to kill him.
  • Three-strikes laws. It's not disproportionate to sentence someone to life in prison for multiple serious criminal offenses. However, the controversy over what offenses are considered "serious" enough to merit such treatment leads to some strange seeming situations, especially if the third "strike" is markedly less serious that the previous ones (being non-violent or involving victimless offenses). People have received third strikes (and XX-life sentences) for such things as shoplifting video tapes, refusing to pay an air-conditioning bill, and drug possession.
  • A French man spent six months plotting the death of a man who had knifed him once in Counter-strike. He eventually did stab him, but missed the heart by an inch.
  • In the nonfiction book Try Not To Laugh, Sergeant Major, one of the anecdotes concerns several British soldiers stationed in West Germany during the '80s. After sneaking away from camp during field maneuvers for a pint, their reaction to having been arbitrarily denied service in a village's only bar by a bigoted tavernkeeper? To ram the muzzle of their Centurion tank through the bar's front window and then fire a blank charge, temporarily deafening everyone and shattering every glass and bottle in the bar.
  • In Kentucky a man killed 5 people and himself, after an argument with his wife about his eggs for breakfast.
  • Most of the symptoms of the common cold are caused not by the virus itself but by the immune system overreacting to it.
  • A 17 year old prankster threw eggs at a guy's Mercedes, the car owner's response? Shooting the kid ten times!
  • A woman in Michigan spent 2 years harassing a family culminating in her making light of a deceased woman and her 7 year-old daughter with Huntington's Disease because the girl's family had not responded quickly enough to a text-message asking if the woman's children could play at a birthday party.
  • A woman once took a toy gun from a child because the child was bullying other children with it. The father of that child posted a video of it on Youtube. The backlash from this resulted in the woman's house being burned down.
  • A Chicago man is fired from his job for wearing a Green Bay Packers tie. Serious Business indeed.
  • A Youtube singer decides to, for laughs, edit a video of him singing to a group of children so it sounds like he's singing a not-so-harmless song. For some reason, now every parent within a 5-mile radius wants his head, and he's been arrested and taken to court, and is threatened with 20 years in prison maximum.
    • He got 60 days, 2 years probation, 200 hours of community service, costs and fines, and has to stay 500 feet away from areas where children under 17 gather during this period. He's also banned from singing the song in question. [7]
  • In 2005, Robert McCartney and Brendan Devine were savagely beaten and stabbed by IRA members outside a Belfast pub; Devine survived, McCartney died in hospital the next day. The motive? One of them was accused of making a rude gesture to the wife of an IRA member.
  • Thirteen record companies suing LimeWire asked for $75 trillion dollars for copyright violations. While it would seem to be a perfectly proportioned retribution, as that's how much money they took from them because some people think they have the right to someone else's creations, the judge disagreed with the request and instead set a more reasonable penalty amounting to the cost of each infringed work instead of the cost of each infringement.
    • It gets even funnier when you find out that only US$8trillion exist in the world.
  • Frogdad: The Ultimate in Parental Trolling.
  • A Khwarezmid Shah executed two Mongolian Ambassadors and a trade delegation. Ghengis Khan retaliated with the utter destruction of the Khwarezmid empire, razing several cities and committing some of the largest individual massacres in human history (and executed the governor of the city where the trade delegation was sacked by pouring molten silver down his throat). According to Juvayni, 1.2 million were executed at Urgench alone.
    • However, killing ambassadors is a common way to unambiguously declare war.
  • A homeless woman faces a $15,000 fine and up to 20 years in prison for enrolling her son in a higher-income school district.
  • Do NOT fall behind on your student loans
    • Update: It was a search warrant for the man's wife, who just abandoned her family, that had committed fraud. Also it was regular police not a SWAT team.
  • One eighteenth century Russian General had a habit of playing with this trope. When he was convinced a given officer was unusually corrupt he waited until that officer committed a petty offense-and then publicly busted him to private.
  • In Sudan a woman gets jailed for wearing pants.
  • Quoth Wikipedia:

"In October 2010, 22-year old Florida mother Alexandra Tobias killed her baby because he would not stop crying while she was playing FarmVille.

    • There are quite a few stories of parents abusing or murdering their children for crying or doing something else typical of kids (not eating their food, wetting their pants, etc.).
    • Although often when mothers kill their young children, it's because of postpartum depression, compounded with sleep deprivation and the fact that being incessantly subjected to loud piercing noises (such as screaming babies) is effectively used as torture in many places. So it's more Despair Event Horizon. (Of course, that's still no excuse)
  • Guess how the Mayor of Vilnius plans to deal with illegal parking?
  • Canada Geese will attack you if you get close to their nest. Or if they want food. Or if they feel like it.
    • Or if they don't feel like it.
  • Stung by a bee. The response? Torch the entire hive.
  • A cop pulls a gun when his hummer gets pelted with snowballs, prompting the jovial mood at the time to turn downright ugly - Don't bring a gun to a snowball fight! More details here.
  • There was this promoter who tried everything they could to have one band allowed to perform in India during the 2011 Grand Prix, but the promoter failed after a security flaw was discovered to halt the original concert and the concert was pulled altogether after it couldn't secure a permit for the band to perform. The consequence? Four concert organizers in prison for six days on fraud charges. Apparently, the Indians consider concerts cancelled on such short notice to be Serious Business, so much that this could very well be the first time a single concert cancellation resulted in prison time for even one concert organizer.
  • A girl in New York City had to go to jail for 36 hours. Why? Because she didn't have her school ID.
  • A woman burned down someone's house, why? Because she defriended her on facebook. Serious Business indeed.
  • A woman faces three years in prison just because she crossed an intersection with her three kids and one of them ran off on his own and was felled by an impaired driver. Sound crazy enough? Well, here's something that's even crazier than that: the one who killed her child only served six months.
    • She was jaywalking, not crossing at the intersection (for the record, the nearest one was over an hour's walk away and it was late at night), and this, combined with endangering the life of a minor, is where her charge comes from. Still reprehensible and something she in no way deserves, though.
  • Hammurabi's law code contains many examples of this (though, to be fair, it was much more benevolent than many other codes at the time). For example, someone who stole from a temple had to pay a fine equal to 30 times the cost of the stolen item. If they were unable or unwilling to do so, they would be put to death.
  • Roy Keane, captain of Premier League football/soccer team Manchester United, did this. Leeds midfielder Alfe Inge Haaland once accused Keane of feigning injury to avoid punishment from the ref, but Keane had legitimately injured his cruciate knee ligaments and was injured for over a year. Keane's response? Next time he was on the pitch with Haaland, three and a half years later Keane set out to deliberately injure him, aiming a vicious kick at Haaland's knee that only vaguely resembled an actual tackle. This was largely responsible for ending Haaland's career.
  • School shootings are generally this, if they're in response to the shooter having been bullied.
  • In New York, a woman owes $300 to a handyman. Said handyman torches her alive in an elevator.
  • During the Berlin Blockade, the only way to get any supplies into the Western sectors were the American "raisin bombers". The Soviet Union was displeased and demanded the USA to stop the flights immediately, lest the Red Army starts to shoot the transports down. The American reply: If the Soviet Union dares to shoot one transport down, the USA shall nuke Moscow. Mind you that was immediately after World War Two when the Soviet Union had neither nuclear weapons to retaliate an attack nor nuclear shelters.
  • Hardline Shari'ah law has this trope as its watchword.
  • Zanzibar reneged on a treaty with Britain in 1896. Bad move. The resulting war lasted 38 minutes.
  • The onset of World War I. Due to various pressures involved, the Austro-Hungarian leadership had been looking for an excuse to wage a war in the Balkans to curb Southern Panslavism for some time, and when the murder of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo occurred they spent no time looking for a way to stretch it into that, not helped by the fact that the assassins divulged they had been assisted by organs within the Serbian government. As a result, Austria-Hungary sent an ultimatum to Serbia involving ten far-reaching points. The Serbs disagreed to one, which was against the Serbian constitution involved the stationing of Habsburg agents on Serbian soil, which would have more or less turned it into a second Bosnia. Vienna used this to justify invading with the intent to annex. And the rest is history. It's worth noting that Otto von Bismarck gave the Austro-Hungarian government fair warning about this in February 1888:

One day, the great European war will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.

  • This shirt encourages one to eat their friends if they don't get Internet Humor.
  • Teens brutally beat their mother after she gets rid of their beer
  • In February 2012, a 15 year old girl complained about her parents giving her a bunch of chores on Facebook. Her dad's response to teach her a lesson? Not to punish her by taking away her laptop, but by taking out a gun and shooting a full clip into it.
  • A 9-year-old girl in Alabama lied to her grandmother and stepmother about eating some candy she was not supposed to have. Her punishment? Being forced to run for three hours straight. Sadly, she died as a result of severe dehydration.
  • There are stories of elementary school children getting arrested for having a tantrum and having it on their permanent record!
  • Arguably subverted with the case of Michael P. Fay, who was tried and convicted of petty theft and vandalism in Singapore in the mid-1990s. He was sentenced to be caned for his crimes, prompting the U.S. government to intervene on the grounds that the punishment was too severe for a teenager. The subversion comes from the American public itself, which largely tended to support Singapore in its intent to cane Fay.
  • Deletha Word is a tragic case of this. When in 1995 she rear-ended a man on a bridge, he and his sons got out of the car, stripped her half-naked, and beat her with tire irons. At one point, the man held her up to the other cars, asking if anyone else wanted "a piece of this bitch". She jumped off the bridge in desperation to escape her attackers and drowned, despite attempts to save her.
  • Sometimes breaking up with your girlfriend can cost you.
  • In Big Brother US, a houseguest named Shelly Moore decides to vote out Fan Favourite (and Creator's Pet) Jeff, knowing there's no way she'll ever win with him around. Jeff's Fan Dumb proceeded to create hate sites for her, called her employers asking that she be terminated, sent death-threats to her friends and family and worst of all, started saying that Shelly's daughter deserved to be taken away from her, or that she should be kidnapped, raped, and killed. Note that Shelly's daughter was EIGHT YEARS OLD at the time. Wishing an eight year old (who had absolutely nothing to do with this show) is about as close to the Real Life Moral Event Horizon and Complete Monster as this wiki will allow in Real Life.
  • Six Virginian workers were fired by their boss for liking the Facebook page of Jim Adams.
  • Kelly Thomas, a mentally ill homeless man, was beaten, tazed, and battered to the point of death by two Fullerton police officers when he refused to give his name and continued to resist arrest. Particularly tragic as he was apologizing profusely while being beaten and even deliriously calling out to his father that they were killing him amid deaf ears. Also an excellent example of Police Brutality.
  • And then there's the grand daddy of all DRs, at least in modern times. In 1989, a group of college students and other civilians began protesting their local government to implement economic and democratic reforms. The protests were largely peaceful, but the government, in their "great wisdom", responded by deploying the army against the protesters, resulting in hundreds if not thousands dead along with many more arrested and dropped into political prisons. Even worse, the government apparently knew this was a DR on their part, and so attempted to bar all foreign press from the country (they failed) and have since implemented a blackout campaign against any form of media that reports the event. And where did this event take place you ask? Just in a "little" nation in Southeastern Asia, around a certain Red Square...
  • A teen-aged girl in Texas (who is an honor student) spent a night in jail for missing school for many days. The worst thing? She is working to help her family since her parents split up and is constantly exhausted from work, which is the reason she misses school so many times.
  • Any time when an Imperial power has violently put down a peaceful rebellion in a colony.
  • South Korean actress Ha Ji-won was Unpersoned because she played a character in Secret Garden that was in a relationship with an character played by an actor one of the "Eight Goddesses" (that secretly controlled the President and most of the country) liked.
  • A Japanese man was arrested for selling hacked Pokémon Sword And Shield monsters. Sure, the man profited from unauthorised modification of a video game, but Western commentators have decried the arrest as being draconian and overkill considering how it's more of a misdemeanour than an actual threat to society: if it was something as heinous as drug trafficking or possession of child pornography, an arrest would be justified, but an arrest for something as simple as modding a video game is too much.
  1. ↑ We should note that cutting off of the hand is defined as the most extreme punishment for theft in the Qur'an; there is currently an argument among scholars of Islamic law as to whether the advent of the modern prison makes even this too extreme. In general, people in countries with more authoritarian regimes tend to favor it, while those with more democratic ones tend to prefer prison; this makes a kind of sense, given that prison in most authoritarian countries in the Muslim world actually means at least starvation, and very often torture, being raped by the guards, and "disappearance".
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