RIP UK Justice

baron said:
This is where the law fails in this instance. It's my understanding that the law permits a reduced charge for multiple people when a) one or more of them has definitely committed murder and b) there is no evidence to demonstrate which. So, if two people go into a room in which a third is murdered then, in the absence of further evidence, neither can be found guilty of murder. What should be the case is that all should be charged with murder, with additional time being given for their non-cooperation.



In the absence of harsher punishments that is exactly what I'd mandate. I can't think of a reason not to do so. Of course, proper sentencing would make the issue moot (or so you'd think - it was reported only yesterday that an inmate in a UK prison got a guard pregnant).
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They were both charged with murder and were both acquitted.

You seem to be implying that when it isn't possible to prove who committed a murder, juries should just convict everyone who might have done it.
 
baron said:
So, a drug addict father of 25 kids (23 actually, as two are now dead) by 18 different women tortures his latest newborn baby over a period of at least a week, fracturing her ribs 40 times, cracking her skull and delivering fatal brain damage, then cooks up a plan with his girlfriend to cover up the murder by strapping the dead baby to the latter's chest, boarding a bus then pretending the child had simply passed away. As the girlfriend set off on her journey the couple gave each other the thumbs up. The girlfriend sent a few texts on her phone and then raised the alarm and sat back as fellow passengers attempted to revive the dead baby.

Both were jailed for 11 years which in the UK means a maximum of 5.5 years in jail and the rest on licence, unless further crimes are committed in custody.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4517902/Couple-tortured-allowed-death-baby-jailed.html

(The DM is the only one currently updated with the sentence)

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...hysical-abuse-months-old-bailey-a7693666.html

So I'm left wondering what exactly is the point? Why bother? This junkie will come out of jail and deposit his junk in some other excuse for a mother and hey presto another kid appears to be abused and murdered.

US justice has many flaws but is there really any justification for allowing these creatures to continue to breathe air?
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No. Nor for leaving this realm not in severe pain.
 
3point14 said:
Well, it's either that or let them die.

And anyway, it's not a payment, it's an investment. Well looked after and well educated, those kids will pay back in taxes much more than they cost.

Not investing in their future would probably leave the taxpayer paying for their life as adults either by provision of social safety net or at her majesties pleasure.



Edit: I do hope that whoever it was that cause the ******** 'taxes are evil' meme to be spread around the world is burning in agony in a hell I don't believe in.
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Yes, yes they should be!!!!
 
Elaedith said:
You seem to be implying that when it isn't possible to prove who committed a murder, juries should just convict everyone who might have done it.
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baron said:
I doubt that's what I was implying.
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baron said:
So, if two people go into a room in which a third is murdered then, in the absence of further evidence, neither can be found guilty of murder. What should be the case is that all should be charged with murder, with additional time being given for their non-cooperation.
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Looks rather like you are, actually, with a Prisoner's Dilemma being dumped on any one of them who's innocent on top of all that.

Dave
 
Dave Rogers said:
Looks rather like you are, actually, with a Prisoner's Dilemma being dumped on any one of them who's innocent on top of all that.

Dave
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So answer me this hypothetical: A man murders his daughter whilst the mother watches. They conspire to dispose of the body. They are apprehended. In court, both deny the charge of murder.

Which of the two is the innocent one?
 
I was an appointed attorney for families who had a child removed from their home by the state (abuse, neglect...etc.). It was all horrible on a sliding scale from "these people *********** suck" to "holy ****, I think we need a new flood - someone talk to God."

There was one woman I remember vividly who had 4 children removed from her care and placed in a foster home - 1 by 1. After she lost the 4th, she screamed at the prosecutor in the hall, "I'm going to keep having *********** kids until you let me keep one."
 
baron said:
So, if two people go into a room in which a third is murdered then, in the absence of further evidence, neither can be found guilty of murder. What should be the case is that all should be charged with murder, with additional time being given for their non-cooperation.
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Now you are being ridiculous. That is nothing like the situation here. The collusion would probably point to an "accessory" charge for either or both. I believe that with this collusion they could even be charged with felony murder in the US.

However, your scenario wouldn't even rise to the level of "preponderance of the evidence" let alone "beyond reasonable doubt". There should be no place in the legal system for sentencing somebody just because they might be guilty. If that were the case then we could dispense with trials altogether and just have sentencing hearings.
 
baron said:
So answer me this hypothetical: A man murders his daughter whilst the mother watches. They conspire to dispose of the body. They are apprehended. In court, both deny the charge of murder.

Which of the two is the innocent one?
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The mother might be innocent of murder if she did not know beforehand that the murder would take place and was not acting in concert, or was under duress. Conspiring to dispose of a body is not the same charge as murder.


Prior to the introduction of the 'causing or allowing the death of a child' law, the outcome in cases where it could not be proven who actually caused a death was that both could be acquitted of murder and escape any punishment at all (or in this case, possibly only a conviction for something like concealing a death). The law was introduced specifically to stop this happening, from what I understand.
 
Hmmm... I remember Theodore Dalrymple made an argument for why he is against the death penalty. He's no wet liberal, by the way, but he did work in prisons and an NHS hospital in, I think, Birmingham. When people expressed surprise that someone with so obviously reactionary views as his was against the death penalty claiming that he surely must know at least one person who was bad enough to be beyond redemption he pointed out that of course he knew that. In fact, there were so many that he wouldn't know where to stop applying the death penalty. In his view, there are masses of scumbags around who spend most of their lives immiserating themselves and others. He is such a misanthropist that it is an effort of will to realize that people need to be convicted of what they have done according to rigourous law and not punished on the basis of how much we inevitably hate them. This is a similar case. Baron's biography of the main perpetrator sickens me, but just because I can't stand the non-criminal elements of his being it does not mean he should be punished to a greater degree than he otherwise would be.
 
Elaedith said:
The mother might be innocent of murder if she did not know beforehand that the murder would take place and was not acting in concert, or was under duress. Conspiring to dispose of a body is not the same charge as murder.


Prior to the introduction of the 'causing or allowing the death of a child' law, the outcome in cases where it could not be proven who actually caused a death was that both could be acquitted of murder and escape any punishment at all (or in this case, possibly only a conviction for something like concealing a death). The law was introduced specifically to stop this happening, from what I understand.
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If it's easier, let's cut through the terminology ('murder', 'manslaughter', 'causing or allowing the death of a child') and say that 'causing or allowing the death of a child' should attract the same penalty as murder. I see little difference between this and joint enterprise, where a person may be convicted of murder without ever having touched the victim. Indeed, the only difference is that in the latter case the perpetrator is known.

This is of course completely different to saying that two people who may have committed a murder should be convicted if the evidence doesn't point clearly to one of them, and the other having been complicit.
 
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angrysoba said:
Hmmm... I remember Theodore Dalrymple made an argument for why he is against the death penalty. He's no wet liberal, by the way, but he did work in prisons and an NHS hospital in, I think, Birmingham. When people expressed surprise that someone with so obviously reactionary views as his was against the death penalty claiming that he surely must know at least one person who was bad enough to be beyond redemption he pointed out that of course he knew that. In fact, there were so many that he wouldn't know where to stop applying the death penalty. In his view, there are masses of scumbags around who spend most of their lives immiserating themselves and others. He is such a misanthropist that it is an effort of will to realize that people need to be convicted of what they have done according to rigourous law and not punished on the basis of how much we inevitably hate them. This is a similar case. Baron's biography of the main perpetrator sickens me, but just because I can't stand the non-criminal elements of his being it does not mean he should be punished to a greater degree than he otherwise would be.
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That's probably the only way of effectively implementing criminal justice using anything like the current system, but I'm not being entirely unserious when I say the idea of examining a person's worth to society, in special instances, would be a reasonable course of action. Naturally we can't go around pointing to people and declaring them a burden on society and chucking them in jail, or hanging them, but I do suggest some crimes should lay the perpetrator open to a life review which would assess their wider impact on society and the world in general. A sort of entropy rating if you like; Entropy too High? Sentenced to Die. Some people, like it or not, have such a consistent and considerable negative impact on all they encounter that their absence would bring nothing but benefit.
 
baron said:
That's probably the only way of effectively implementing criminal justice using anything like the current system, but I'm not being entirely unserious when I say the idea of examining a person's worth to society, in special instances, would be a reasonable course of action. Naturally we can't go around pointing to people and declaring them a burden on society and chucking them in jail, or hanging them, but I do suggest some crimes should lay the perpetrator open to a life review which would assess their wider impact on society and the world in general. A sort of entropy rating if you like; Entropy too High? Sentenced to Die. Some people, like it or not, have such a consistent and considerable negative impact on all they encounter that their absence would bring nothing but benefit.
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This reads like the start of a dystopian sci-fi novel.
I'm no bleeding heart, and have been known to sympathize with 3-strikes-you're-out , but this is horrific.
 
Giz said:
This reads like the start of a dystopian sci-fi novel.
I'm no bleeding heart, and have been known to sympathize with 3-strikes-you're-out , but this is horrific.
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Not so much. Assessment of entropy is only a way of describing what we do now, in attaching seriousness and impact to the crime. My suggestion simply goes a bit further under certain limited circumstances, and involves the character as opposed to just the crime.
 
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MikeG said:
I don't think we can say that British justice is dead until justice has run its course. It is perfectly possible that there could be an appeal against the leniency of the sentences.

I thought that a murder charge had the option of conversion to manslaughter, so I am surprised that this wasn't the charge they were convicted of. Perhaps any lawyers here might help with the understanding of that.
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IANAL nor do I play one on TV, but I think in this case that because each denied that they were responsible for the child's injury and death, the jury could not be certain which one had killed the child. So they could not convict either one of murder or manslaughter, but could convict of causing or allowing the death.

It seems to me that the sentencing guidelines for causing or allowing a death need to be overhauled - a maximum of 14 years seems far too lenient. But until that happens, these two people have been sentenced according to the guidelines.
 
baron said:
Not so much. Assessment of entropy is only a way of describing what we do now, in attaching seriousness and impact to the crime. My suggestion simply goes a bit further under certain limited circumstances.
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Does your suggestion take into account the benefits to society that these people produce in prison? Even Brady and Shipman worked on translating and producing books in Braille while they were imprisoned.
 
Agatha said:
Does your suggestion take into account the benefits to society that these people produce in prison? Even Brady and Shipman worked on translating and producing books in Braille while they were imprisoned.
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I think mine is a suggestion with merit but even I don't claim it can predict the future. Not that doing so would produce anything of consequence as translating a few books wouldn't tip the scales significantly against the torture and murder of five children or the murder of 100 pensioners.


EDIT: But that was an aside, I don't want to derail my own thread.
 
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Mike! said:
One can always hope something really bad happens to his nuts while he's incarcerated. Better still, something worse happens to his skull.
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In the US prison system, he would be a dead man walking. Even the toughest criminals hate people who abuse or kill kids.
 
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