Bill Williams said:
To the lay-mind, I'd argue that all reasons for judgement seem nutty to some degree. Some times they are forced to deal with idiomatic legal concepts the importance of which escapes everyone else except similarly trained people.
As for the highlighted part, there have been many well-considered posts to this very thread which would disagree. Some claim that the difference between paragraph 1 and paragraph 2 is simply a legislative remnant which has not real practical implication - certainly not one claimed by lay-commentators. But then, what do I know.
Bill, you are quite correct. I sound like a stuck record but it is important to note that Law like Accountancy is not a pure science dealing with empirical facts. Law makers set down man made rules which courts simply follow. These rules may not be logical and are steeped in historical baggage. They are the best we have.
Capital punishment is a prime example of an "illegal law" which contradicts law. It's there. It has no right to be there. But like judicial facts it just is.
In a former incarnation a lot of years ago, I volunteered at a Crown Counsel's office at the local courthouse. As such, I was sometimes required to sit through the lengthy process of a judge reading a "reasons for judgement" which had to accompany a judge-alone trial.
Sometimes such a document was also prepared for a jury trial, except here it is illegal for a jury member to divulge ANYTHING to do with how they arrived at their decision. (Sometimes news-outlets try to divine the tea-leaves of such things based on questions a deliberating jury sends out to the judge.)
But even then, on sentencing a judge is required to write a reason for sentence, which sometimes makes reasonable guesses as to how the jury decision guides him/her in that secondary consideration.
Suffice it to say, early on as time allowed I was able to ask a Crown Counsel, "What the heck was THAT Reason for Judgement about?" I'm not legally trained, but I can read/listen to a narrative. One I remember distinctly as seemingly (for the first 30 pages) leading towards an acquittal, when on page 31 (or thereabouts!) the judge made an about-face and gave the reasons why the guilty-bastard was being sentenced to 30 years in the slammer.
The Crown Counsel told me that, yes, to the untrained ear that might sound contradictory but, obviously hidden to my eye, that case had many avenue of appeal open to it and the judge was doing the best that could be done to close off avenues of appeal. Not that it meant anything to me.
Although I had only sat through one or two days of testimony, I was also surprised as all get-out that the totally convincing evidence (to me at least) I heard never made it into the reasons for judgement. What do I know?
I came out of it appreciated greatly the role Crown Counsel played. They were mostly fair-minded people who pushed cases fairly and dispassionately, and were all to quick to admit to a mistake. That's perhaps one of the things which hooked me into this way-back-when, reading the nonsense that Mignini tried to shoe-horn into a horrible murder - nonsense against two obviously innocent people.
I also have some experience in accountancy. When someone tried to explain to me that a "liability" was money we had in the bank, but that an "asset" was something we owed someone else, I quit asking why.
