Human Empathy

After reading the interesting Room for Debate, "Does Empathy Guide or Hinder Moral Action?" I was pondering.  Does empathy give us more power behind our judicial system or does it sunder it to an extent?  Should we as people rely on our hearts or our minds?

Empathy an compassion are qualities that make us human, to feel for another person's emotions and being able to respond properly.  However, this quality can't just be categorized in their more "positive" sense.  Compassion is when you see a homeless person down on their luck and you give them a dollar.  Empathy could be categorized as as something familiar to this, but it could also be described as feeling the same anger and disgust of a father staring at his daughter's rapist in court.  This sort of feeling can be hindering in a court of law, as it may enforce a biased judgement.  Yet should we always enforce a "This person did X crime, therefore they should serve Y months" formula?

Take for instance that girl who killed her boyfriend because he convinced her to think a dictionary was enough to stop a .50 cal Desert Eagle.  Even though it was a fact that she shot him, the court saw the distraught state the girl was in and felt that her punishment didn't fit the crime.  By definition this was murder, yet leaving the law to nothing more than "black and white" decision making doesn't always make it right.  Human empathy is a gift along with our sentience, and if we don't utilize it, are we still what makes us human?

Do you think that empathy helps out mortality?  Should courts only factor in the crime and nothing else?

-Joanne Marie Navarrete