I see John Allen Muhammad was executed in America today.
His defence lawyers tried to have the decision to have him executed overturned because they believed he was mentally ill!
What kind of argument is that? Of course he's mentally ill! He's still a murderer!
I have been to many a trial where the judge has gone to sleep after lunch!
All trials are encompassed by " cases stated" ie results from other trials which have gone to appeal to clear up points of ambiguity & points of law,etc.etc
which in effect govern the result of the trial, I am a firm believer that many results are decided before the trial has even begun as far as setence goes!
Barristers often get together and discuss the fate of the accused over lunch....Of course, they wouldn't admit it!
I take your point about the differing circumstances of how a victim met his demise...It is time that murder was removed from being a common law offence ie A person is guilty of murder if they unlawfullly cause the death of a human being with malice aforthought .....Maybe it's time it was on the statute book and there were different degrees of murder perhaps.
This was how the law stood up to when I left the Constabulary a few years ago...It could have been changed of course....
I can understand the arguments in favour of reinstating the death penalty for some crimes. However, there is one huge problem, which is that our justice system is imperfect. How many innocent people have gone to prison, only to be released and given compensation at a later date when new evidence proved their innocence? It would be very difficult to do the same for someone who was wrongly executed. A posthumous pardon wouldn't really help them much.
In my opinion it is better for the guilty to be allowed to live than for the innocent to be killed. Until the day when we have a 100% infallible justice system (i.e. never), I will be against the death penalty.
As much as I have a deep seated feeling that some criminals don't deserve to live, this is the crux of the matter. I would like to see some categories of criminal summarily executed, child molesters for instance, but like Baruch my confidence we could do this without mistake is not high.
However, I would have a system where such pond life lived in a far harder regime, maybe in organised work gangs etc. And I would not let people like Ian Huntley out until someone proved incontrovertaby that he was no longer a threat.
Oh dear, what a sucker. Read the red tops much?
Knowing and associating as I have with judges, I can assure you that on average they are incisively intelligent, have a breadth of knowledge and understanding, and certainly those from the criminal courts have mixed and dealt with more criminals in a lifetime of legal work than anybody except perhaps policemen.
Most people posting on this forum haven't a f***ing clue about the real criminal issues that face this (or any) country. What they do get they get second or third hand from newspapers and TV reporting which is a shadow of what it used to be. Judges, on the other hand, sit every day in cases involving drug dealing, robbery, burglary, assault, ABH, GBH, rape and murder. Every year they have to attend training courses where they learn of the real trends in crime and in law and order policy. They talk to each other over lunches, and they talk with lawyers at the sharp end - defenders and prosecutors - on a monthly if not weekly basis. They read reports and take a keen interest in developments in criminal law from across the whole world.
Judges have wives or husbands and children, parents and friends; they don't live in some sort of gated community. They go to work on the Tube, and they watch Strictly Come Dancing on Saturdays. They know about 'real life' a bloody sight more than most ordinary people know about criminal law.
Finally, the last thing to say about (criminal) judges is this. They are under tremendous pressure from the Ministry of Justice: (public outrage about a horrible crime) "increase sentences!", (public outcry about costs of more prisons) "decrease sentences!" (more public outrage about a horrible crime) "impose more custodial sentences!" (treasury warnings about lack of funds for the prison service) "impose fewer custodial sentences!"
Imagine, returning to the subject of the thread, that you are the man who has the discretion whether to sentence the accused to death, or to imprisonment for life. Imagine further, that you are aware that in the country where you work, in the last 20 years dozens of people have had their murder convictions - even multiple convictions - quashed. And imagine then that you have to decide whether to say the words that will send the man or woman in front of you to a prison to await the day on which their life will be stolen from them - by brisk, unemotional, impersonal people he or she does not know, and away from all the people who have ever loved him or her. And all the time you cannot discount the possibility that he or she is completely innocent...
Wow. So ... picking only the obvious issues out of that...
is it the case that all people who commit murder are mentally ill?
and we are to kill people even when we strongly suspect that their responsibilty for their actions is impaired by insanity or mental illness?
What total cobblers!
Lunchtimes are almost always completely taken up with preparation for the afternoon's witnesses. Counsel in trials do not lunch with the judge. The determination of guilt is the responsibility of the jury, not the barristers nor the judge. That's just three examples of rampant foolishness in your post.
I speak as I find.
You make sweeping, insulting generalisations on an issue you have no great experience of, and guess what? I will post back accordingly.
I will say that I regret and would apologise for the phrase 'haven't a f***ing clue', as that does not convey what I intended. The point I was trying to make is that the forum tends not to be a place where people post who have direct, first-hand and regular experience of lawlessness (including me, although I am lawyer and so have seen the system from the inside), and to that extent and for them these matters are mostly a question of conjecture.
To take another example, modern sentencing guidelines leave judges and magistrates with less and less freedom to exercise their own discretion. Nevertheless it will be the judge who catches it in the neck from the meeja if he does not impose, e.g., the custodial sentence that Sun journalists deem appropriate - even if current MOJ requirements made it impossible for him so to do.
Time of the month then is it Steve. !!!
Jeez.... talk about OTT.
Experienced or not, we all have opinions from what we see and hear in the press, Tv, life, personal experiences and we are all entitled to vent them in whatever way we see fit.
Death penalties have always been a good subject to discuss because there is not right or wrong answer and there never will be. There will only be opinions based on peoples own life experiences.
I for one am keen to bring back death penalty but i dont know how it could be implemented for all the reasons as being discussed. Errors, innocent, who gets it and who does not so, whilst i would love to see certain murderers sent to the gallows, its highly unlikely to ever happen or even more importantly, there will never be a fullproof system implemented to sentence it.
Since I do know and know about judges, I conclude that someone posting that they are all out-of-touch old fogies does not know about judges. Just the same as if someone told me that Alexander Pope was a bad poet I would conclude he or she knows nothing about poetry.
By the way it seems unlikely that one can make a 'sweeping' anything about only one person...
Indubitably.
And if opinions based on half-baked journalism are posted, I will remonstrate with the poster. I haven't said much about the main subject of the thread - the death penalty - I took issue largely with the remarks about judges and their abilities, and extrapolating from there to discuss the way in which people acquire such half-witted beliefs.
My main objection to a death penalty is that it is simply inhuman to kill someone. Doesn't matter what that person did first. To make that person sit in prison knowing the day and hour of their death and watching it rumble across the calendar toward him or her is the pinnacle of barbarity.
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