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the death penalty argument is dead. Forget it….
I’m not sure I agree either on principle or in practise.
In principle I believe we as a society have the right to decide that some crimes (committed by people of sound mind) as so heinous that the perpetrator no long affords any protect under the law. And that that person should be removed from society by death.
In practise I accept this would be unworkable under current (English) legal system where the burden of proof of guilt is beyond all reasonable doubt. In response I would suggest it would be possible to introduction ‘Capital Cases’ were the burden of proof is increased to ‘beyond all possible doubt’. This could be checked in its process by the conclusion being reached independently by jury, law lords and parliament, for example.
I think someone like Ian Huntley could be trailed on this basis.
Precisely my outlook on the matter pompete, I agree it is unworkable, and realistically there would be a lot less cases probably proven beyond reasonable doubt, with the death penalty, as a confession is probably the best evidence going to prove something beyond doubt. There would also be the aspect of an outcry to the home secretary for certain offences (acts of terrorism, and others with big media focus etc) where the public would want a perpetrator and a hanging as soon as possible.
However it does wind me up sometimes to look at some of the evil self confessed nasty pieces of work that we are paying huge amounts of money to rot at her majestys pleasure for the rest of their always-too-long lives. Huntley, Ian Brady, Sutcliffe, the Ipswich ripper etc, just havent had the decency to follow in the final footsteps of Shipman and Fred West.
Just taking this a step further I also have doubts about the ability of a jury to make such major decisions.
I was always bought up to believe the jury system was the fairest way to decide a case – that was until I served on a two jury’s in the early 1990’s.
The first thing that struck me about our justice system is the adversarial system is actually unfair as the outcome can too easily depend on which side has the most competent barrister presenting the case – which explains why some of the top barristers always do so well – they are better performers.
Ergo if you can afford a better barrister then you have more chance of “getting off”.
However I digress – some people serving on a jury are not fit to carry out such a role. The first case I was on was six lads on charges of riotous assembly and assaulting police officers – which carries quite a high penalty.
A number of the jurors came in with the view that whatever the police said was gospel, end of story. In truth if one listened to the evidence carefully there were many contradictions in the police evidence and certainly more than enough questions to question their version of events.
There was no doubts the lads were present but there was more than sufficient doubt as to their guilt. However the discussions were heated to say the least.
The handful of jurors with “the police must be right attitude” even accepted there were inconsistencies but still would not budge from a guilty verdict. In the end we were allowed a majority verdict and eventually managed to agree not-guilty verdicts in most of the charges. In the other two we could not reach a decision and in the end they dropped the charges.
What worried me was had there not been three or four of us to point out the inconsistencies then there was every chance these lads could have been convicted.
The other case was one of the first in the country of a man being charged with raping his wife and sodomy with his wife. One juror based his decision on, and I quote “the bible says sodomy is wrong, therefore he should be found guilty of all charges.”
Even more worrying a middle aged female juror actually said, “a husband should be allowed to have sex with his wife whenever he wants to,” and initially would not accept he had done anything wrong.
Eventually we returned unanimous guilty verdicts and it was interesting that after we had returned the verdict it came out he had previous form for sexual assault and he faced further charges for assaulting his children.
What really annoyed us though was the judges comment at sentencing that as the victim was his wife and not a stranger he would reduce the sentence and he only got three years.
Experiences like this really do make you question your faith in justice.
I honestly believe that I would now be inclined to favour the French inquisitorial system of justice rather than our adversarial system.
I thought we were moving towards a new justice system, the ‘on-the-spot-fine’ system. This is where a copper accuses you of doing something, you can then buy him off with a medium size fine, say £100. If you don’t plead guilty on the spot and decide to go to court you get a doubled fine plus costs, say £850.
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