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Should Peter Sutcliffe be released?

Andrew Wiggin said:
I freely admit it's amateurish, but you did take the bait, proving that amateurish efforts are sufficient when standards are low. Some fish need bait that looks like the real thing in every aspect, but some fish will bite at anything shiny... One could use this to test the intelligence of fish, I imagine.

A
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Just so you know:
- there's a big difference between "taking the bait", responding in kind, or treating it contemptibly. I responded in kind
- taking the piss should be witty (good try for a newby)
- taking the piss should be topical (pass)
- when taking the piss one should expect a response (fail)

Here's some more info on it. I have highlighted an important point that relates to you, I believe. The bolded bracketted bits are mine.

Targets of a piss-take are expected to reply in kind. An insulting joke in return often increases an Australian's appreciation for you (you fail). The English are usually quite good at returning insults. Convicts, Rolf Harris, and voting to retain an English Queen give the Poms good material to work with. Americans seem to have more trouble at taking the piss and perhaps relations between Australia and America are so good as a consequence. (generally speaking Americans know they are out of their depth - and/or should learn the rules before entering the fray)

If you are offended by an Australian taking the piss (like you chief) is best to smile and change the topic. Showing the joke hurt your feelings may simply increase the motivation of the Australian to keep saying the joke (yep) getting angrier and threatening violence may simply result in the Australian taking you up on your offer (or calling you a pussy)
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http://www.convictcreations.com/culture/socialrules.htm
 
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Soapy Sam said:
Let me think really hard about this.
A man is convicted of 13 murders and 7 attempts.
He may, or may not be clinically insane as well as a mass murderer.
We have a choice;-
1. Lock him away for ever.
2. Let him out
3. Put him down.

Why does everyone find this so hard?
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Yes, I know you'd have hanged him.

He's not exactly my poster child for the anti-death-penalty movement either. But I prefer to live in a civilised country.

Rolfe.
 
I'm just glad that our worst mass murderer, Martin Bryant, wiill never be released. I don't think we are an uncivilised country because of this.
 
Indeed no. And I'd be perfectly happy for Sutcliffe and the rest of them to stay in jail till they're ready for a hospice (or at least a nursing home).

I was just having my usual death penalty disagreement with my hardline rightwinger friend soapy Sam. :D

Rolfe.
 
Martin Bryant is in solitary confinement for the rest of his days. If was exposed to the general prison population he would not survive a long time, me thinks.

How is Sutcliffe confined btw?
 
There's quite a bit about this in the Wiki page on Sutcliffe.

He's been in a secure mental hospital for many years, after the diagnosis of schizophrenia.

It's the combination of his psychiatrists having declared the schizophrenia to be "virtually cured", and him coming near to the end of the 30-year judges recommendation on his sentence that has prompted this debate.

I'd forgotten, until I looked at the Wiki page, that he was almost blinded by an attack by another prisoner in 1997. He's been the target of a number of serious assaults, both in prison and in the mental hospital.

Rolfe.
 
commandlinegamer said:
From the Telegraph link on the WP page [1] - "He is effectively cured as long as he never stops taking his medication,"

I think this is big issue: how do you make sure this happens?

[1] - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/new...Sutcliffe-fit-to-be-freed-from-Broadmoor.html
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Yeah that's part of the problem. The other is they've treated his schizophrenia, which may not be what's prompting him to kill anyway. Schizophrenia isn't a common link among serial killers that I'm aware of and it's pretty ballsy for them to think that they've cured a serial killer for treating that.
 
Rolfe said:
The "Yorkshire Ripper", Peter Sutcliffe, is seeking a court ruling on the tariff on his sentence. At his trial the judge recommended a minimum of 30 years (which expires next year) but imposed no formal tariff.

At the time of his trial there was some discussion about his sanity. It was a bit of a Catch 22 - nobody who did what he did could be called sane, surely? However, he was tried for murder (not manslaughter) and considered to be sane at the time.

He was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and moved to a secure mental hospital. His psychiatrists are now saying that he's "virtually cured" and presents a "very low risk" of re-offending.

However, there is a strong argument from within the criminal justice system that his notoriety is such that he will have to be kept confined forever because he may well literally be lynched if certain segments of the general public get their hands on him. In addition, this news comes simultaneously with significant public concern over the risk posed by mental health patients who are allowed to live freely in the community. There was a BBC TV documentary only last night about one such murder. "Virtually" cured, and "very low" risk don't sound entirely reassuring to me.

Here's the BBC news report of Sutcliffe's application.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bradford/8543353.stm

Oh, and by the way, I'm obviously psychic.

Rolfe.
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Re: lynched. Fine by me. I do not care what the mental condition of something that does what it did is - now or then.
 
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I do wonder, since his mental state was not part of his defence, whether having his schizophrenia under control would be a main criterion for his release at all. I presume he would also have to meet the same criteria as other "sane" lifers including all the reoffending courses etc. I don't know whether high security hospital prisoners would have access to these courses.

I also keep thinking of Graham Young:

Young was sentenced to 15 years in Broadmoor but was released after nine years, having been deemed “fully recovered”. After release from hospital in 1971, he began work as a storekeeper at John Hadland Laboratories, which manufactured thallium bromide-iodide infrared lenses used in military equipment. Soon after he began work, his foreman, Bob Egle, grew ill and died. Young had been making tea laced with poisons for his colleagues. A sickness swept through his workplace and, mistaken for a virus, was nicknamed the Bovingdon Bug. These cases of nausea and illness, sometimes severe enough to require hospitalization, were later attributed to Young and his tea. Young poisoned about 70 people during the next few months, although none fatally. Young is the subject of an extremely good film called The Young Poisoner’s Handbook
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http://listverse.com/2010/02/21/top-10-notable-residents-of-broadmoor-hospital/
 
crackers said:
No, there isn't. That's kind of the point of it.
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Actually, there is a chance you'll walk out, unless the possibility of parole is explicitly denied at sentencing. Unlikely in the vast majority of cases, but still possible.

It is still technically possible that Charles Manson could walk out of prison in 2012, however unlikely.
 
luchog said:
Actually, there is a chance you'll walk out, unless the possibility of parole is explicitly denied at sentencing. Unlikely in the vast majority of cases, but still possible.

It is still technically possible that Charles Manson could walk out of prison in 2012, however unlikely.
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Has he been sufficiently reformed?
 
From memory the psychiatrists actually diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia before the trial. In England and Wales persons charged with murder have to have two psychiatric reports before trial. The psychiatrists agreed that he was insane and therefore the Crown were going to accept guilty pleas to manslaughter. The Judge queried this and they decided there would be a trial after all. Junior counsel for the Crown absolutely demolished the psychiatrists on the stand. Their thesis turned out to be mostly based on what Sutcliffe had told them. Their idea was he was a schizophrenic who killed as a part of his mission - not a sexual sadist. Counsel pointed out certain features of the crimes which definitely pointed to the latter and showed that Sutcliffe had been lying to them.
It was also pointed out that his wife was most definitely a paranoid schizophrenic and he would know a lot about symptons etc

What didn't come out at the trial was that Sutcliffe was wearing clothing adapted for some kind of sexual action at the time he was arrested...

The psychiatrists were not happy with what had happened - so after sentence they maintained their diagnosis (there are only a handful of forensic consultant psychiatrists in the UK) giving the prison system no choice but to send him to Broadmoor (the other two secure psychiatric hospitals being far too close to Yorkshire).
 
Rolfe said:
Indeed no. And I'd be perfectly happy for Sutcliffe and the rest of them to stay in jail till they're ready for a hospice (or at least a nursing home).

I was just having my usual death penalty disagreement with my hardline rightwinger friend soapy Sam. :D

Rolfe.
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I'm not hardline. I just think there has to be a line.
Maybe you get to cross it once, if you have a really good reason, - but not 13 times.
Also, I honestly find the idea of permanent incarceration to be a far more cruel and unnatural punishment than a swift execution. In fact I'm baffled that so many people either can't see that, or pretend not to.

We have been brainwashed into thinking it "uncivilised" to kill known murderers in our own country, but think it just fine to send 19 year olds with machine guns to Afghanistan to shoot foreigners who might, under some unlikely future circumstance, be a threat to the free market. That's not just stupidity, it's racist stupidity.

Seriously, I don't think I'm the right winger on this issue.

But on economic grounds alone, spending $6000 on a sick cat is an example of unparalleled rationality compared to spending what we do to keep something like this alive.
Can't see any sense in it at all.
 
I understand your viewpoint, and it's not unreasonable. I have reasons for taking a different view.

On the first one, that however certain you think you are, miscarriages of justice can come back and bite you. And I'd prefer the victim of such a miscarriage still to be alive so that there's some hope of making some sort of recompense.

On the second one, I'm not going to defend the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. But two wrongs don't make a right.

On the third, I'd defend the right of people who have the £6,000 to spend it any way they want to. If their cat is worth that sort of money to them, then that's their affair. I tend to share your opinion of the sense of such expenditure sometimes, but then it's not my cat or my money. You could spend that on an upmarket holiday. If your cat's worth more to you than your world cruise, then you should be allowed to make that decision.

I understand your viewpoints too though, so can we agree to disagree? :)

Rolfe.
 
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