You may be onto something there, Nog! Would go some way towards limiting the number of 18 year old girls with babies whose accommodation I seem to be paying for - despite having never met them! LOL Yep, there's no justice system in England, just a "civil service" dedicated to the Law (whatever that may be).
18 yr old girls Loz? I think you are being generous......my brother, a prison officer, has a step daughter who first whelped at 16, has just had another and yes, we taxpayers provide her with a 3 bedroomed house. She is one that should have been neutered at birth.....
Most times, I can see both sides of the argument, and would support life in a basic prison, rather than the death penalty. But, life in prison should be that, and it should be a very basic standard of living, and they stay in prison until they die. Occasionally, I have my "hang them high" head on. For many years, about 25, I've held a view of what should happen to these "monsters". If your crime is premeditated, involves inhuman cruelty and ends in the victims death ..... Then only one punishment in my eyes, if we have irrevocable evidence of guilt, DNA, CCTV, witness etc etc They have behaved in a non human way, and should be treated as such. We have many illness that kill people ie: cancer, HIV, dementia etc Give the illness to the guilty monster, then try to cure them. If you cure them, they have been a help to human kind .... Then give them something else, and try to cure them again. If you fail to cure them, and they die ..... So be it. I know this is an extreme view, and will be seen as legal torture etc etc But, if a crime is so horrendous, and premeditated, then the punishment should be extreme.
Stated by Lord Chief Justice, (and although I personally think it is a massive flaw in the system, he was technically correct) that the British judicial system is "not here to pander to the wishes of the populous, but to administer the law as it is written. Only this week a convicted teenage murderer (who admitted to stabbing his carer 10 times because he'd been grounded!!!) was given a sentence of only 7 years imprisonment because he had 'mental deficiencies', meaning he couldn't distinguish between fact and fiction, and therefore could not be held responsible for his actions ..... so maximum permissible charge was manslaughter. Call me stupid but surely in that case the sentence should be (if not death penalty) indefinite imprisonment?
I am really surprised you are classing a death caused by a momentary lapse (for example) which will probably live with the person who caused the accident for the rest of their life, with a planned and savoured slow death of someone whose last moments will live with the person who caused that for the rest of their lives, but for entirely different reasons.
A couple of things here, I don't know all the evidence in the case that has started this thread, I don't know that the other responders do either? If so how do they know what this evidence is? So we are presuming there is a history of abuse and that the child was deliberately killed? These might both come out to be the case when evidence is provided, but I haven't seen nor heard that this is the case. The police investigation is only just getting under way, best to let it run it's course and allow the system we do have to deliver a verdict. If you want to change the system then you have a number of avenues open to you. I can't agree with the 'lynch them' mentality expressed elsewhere on here and I do have a close family relative (a child) who was murdered by her nurse and Lesley Molseed's close family worked for my dad. I remember her disappearance in the 1970's, my mother's reaction to it and the impact in the press. Thankfully the judiciary, the administration of the legal system, the MP's and Ministers creating our law's are all far brighter people than I am. Our process of law is flawed, therefore the lack of a death penalty means we are the better for it.
Possibly the most important point here is that life should mean life and not a sentence that can be halved or I believe even cut to 1/3. And whilst I am not against the death penalty it should only be used in 100% certain cases ( I.e caught in the act). I also believe that prison should be a punishment not an easy " holiday". Prisoners should be made to work for their keep, even if it's breaking rocks for road repairs, and they should be kept under armed guard. One false move and shoot the b'stards . As a deterrent to youngsters I would recommend that at a very young age ( say 8-10) they should be shown round somewhere like Feltham Young Offenders establishment. I went there to play football against the prison officers at age 23 and as a law abiding person it scared the shit out of me!
Which is it then? An easy Holiday or a shit scary place? You've implied both in one post, you can't have it both ways. If Prison is a holiday why would a young offenders establishment scare you? Edit On reflection I really don't care what prison conditions are like, I want a penal system that offers the best chances of rehabilitation for the maximum number of people at the lowest cost to the taxpayer and in cases where rehabilitation is not possible keeps the offender locked away securely without chance of escape. If that means sending more hoody wearing teenagers on adventure holidays and building a secure facility on Titan I'm all in favour. What I don't want is an inhumanly harsh system that churns out hardened embittered professional criminals with no life skills and no thought other than avoiding capture.
For the sake of clarity, I actually do think there should be a trial first. If the defendant is found to be as murderous and morally repellent as we are assuming him to be, then death penalty. If in this particular case, the facts of the case indicate an entirely different set of circumstances, then it's something else. I am not pre-judging the defendant - I have nearly no facts to go on. I am discussing a proposed course of action where inhuman cruelty and murder is involved and the perpetrator is caught. Did anyone here think that there was a lynchin' to be had, no trial necessary?
Ian, help me understand how we know already that this is an abusive murder that has taken place? The very fact that people will rush to a 'bring back the death penalty' shout before we know any of the evidence is exactly why we shouldn't have a death penalty.
Prison is a scary, soul destroying place for an innocent person, with little or no malice in them, to try to endure. It is a very different place for folks of a very different mindset.
But you can't establish all facts, you can only weigh evidence available, it's a fundamental principle in our process.
Royum, how on earth can you justify sending someone to prison if you can only weigh evidence? You don't have the facts! If the Court decides that the defendant did something inhumanly horrible - my definition - and if there's enough evidence to put him in Prison, there's enough evidence to put him to death. Make that a fundamental principle. This half-way house of "Well, he's guilty enough to go to prison for life but what if he isn't guilty, we can't execute him!" ... well it's inconsistent and fatally flawed as a principle. Outcomes: either the guy did something or he didn't. If it was him, did he accidentally imprison/torture/murder a helpless child or was any part of that deliberate? Outcomes.
Talk it through with a lawyer or a barrister, they'll explain our process as I'm not qualified. It is how our system works though, a jury weighs evidence to beyond a reasonable doubt, no-one can establish all facts. You are saying that you are happy that someone can end your life even though they might get it wrong, that's not a logical argument, no matter how forcefully you push it.
Yes, I am happy that someone could end my life due to a mistake. Happier than I am that someone could send me to prison for life due to a mistake, in any event. I ought to explain, that I am a believer in quality of life over and above anything else. As an innocent man in prison, I would consider my quality of life to be insufficient and would prefer it to be terminated. I am possibly in a minority here, of course. However, whilst I accept that in an imperfect legal system, mistakes and injustices occur that lead to incorrect guilty verdicts, I see this as no bar in principle to the existence of a death penalty. In the same way that I see no bar to the existence of prison sentences in an imperfect legal system. I don't believe in "better to execute nine innocents than let one guilty man go free". That is not a straw man you can set up and attack. I believe that it is better to execute one innocent (or nearly so) than let ninety-nine monsters go free. And I would do everything possible to reduce the chances of that 1% miscarriage of justice. If that seems harsh, that's because it is. Please note, where I say "better", I don't mean "desirable". I simply see it as an inevitable consequence of a flawed but broadly workable legal system. Some tangential questions: If there was a death penalty, who would it discourage from committing the crimes that warrant it? If there was a death penalty, would police forces be quite as willing to "fit-up" suspects with falsified or incorrectly obtained evidence? Why are people willing to pay for the long-term upkeep of the worst kind of criminal simply to salve their conscience as regards the death penalty?
