Immigrant Crimes: Cultural Tactic

The article, “Immigrant Crimes: Cultural Defense--a Legal Tactic” by Myrna Oliver is published in the Los Angeles Times. The author’s purpose was to evaluate the use of cultural defense on actions that we, as American believed that it’s morally wrong. Oliver uses different examples and testimonies to display the effective use of culture defense to justified behaviors that violates American laws. The article argues that cultural defense is popular among immigrants to get lighter punishments since they have different values and beliefs in their hometown. This article is valuable to explain the concept of cultural defense as it provides scenarios to past court cases that use their culture to reduce charges and sentence. One of the scenarios

This scenario is talking about two young Japanese mothers in San Francisco and Los Angeles who killed their children after learning that their husbands were having affairs. Their cases were only accused of manslaughter after experts suggested that parent-child suicide is frequently practiced in the women’s native culture after the wives got humiliated by their husband’s infidelity. However, I believed that the two women should receive the penalty of that to murder. As Fresno Superior Court Judge Gene M. Gomes claim that, “Even without intent to commit a certain crime, if an act is harmful to society, we are not going to condone it,” I truly agree with that because murder is an inappropriate behavior. As an outsider, I don’t fully understand the Japanese concept of killing their child, but I don’t believe if a mother is not evil enough, she will kill her own child just to add guilt to her husband. I think this case went beyond the cultural aspect. Also, the child, regardless of their culture, the child is protected by law since they’re in the US and they have the rights to live. In this situation we don’t have much evidence as if the child also practice this cultural behavior, but even if they do, they certainly didn’t die out of their own will. I believed that if the death was not commit out of one’s willingness then that is consider a murder. Additionally, the Declaration of Human Rights, even though it’s an American culture and value, some of the ideas in the Human Rights Constitution are general philosophy that applied to many circumstances, including the child that the mother killed, so the two mothers should be sentenced under