h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A smiley of your own? Why didn't you say so!

How's 'bout ?

I don't use my first name here either (Ford's), just towel .

Seems less formal somehow.

I agree; Thanks to all who have made this an interesting and intelligent conversation.

(I'm also waiting for my own smiley! Maybe a [neongreen]!)

Oh! Ooooh! That would be lovely, NGC.

I hope you get it!

I agree that this is a difficult case on which to base a case for the abolition forever of capital punishment but surely the only alternative would be to reserve dire piunishment for cases where the criminal was caught on CCTV committing the murder as over time many people have died for crimes of which they claimed innocence. As the first reply says the two men armed themselvs in a manner liable to injure someone else and the hung man had a pistol albeit the wrong one. What was that there for? As a paperweight incase they stole a lot of money? If a gang of men went armed with pistols all round the aw has to be right for saying that they are all equally guilty if someone gets shot. That is only fair.

Crime and punishment are intractable problems. If you want to make sure a person doesn't do something again, you have to kill them or disable them pretty fundamentally.

Short of that what you do to them is either revenge or forgiveness. At a guess I'd give them about equal marks for effectiveness, maybe with a tiny advantage to forgiveness.

There is another reason for locking people up, to keep them from opportunities to re-offend. This I would recommend for such people as psycopaths; but it is not to be confused with punishment: more a form of disabling.

And why do you prefer locking up as an alternative to killing, regarding disabling?

The disablement is less, em, physically permanent.

An eye for an eye was the way
Of revenge in rough justice's day;
But now we forgive
And let wrongdoers live
With a healthier forfeit to pay.

Any why is lack of physical permanence an advantage?

Insurance against wrong verdict.

Hmmm, the hoary thread rises again, so far I think that Fords Towel's reasoning is unemotional [good] and rational [good & yes I do think there is such a thing as irrational reasoning ].

The thing that almost never gets mentioned is the case where the 'guilty' either gets off on a technicality or serves time and is released. If this person(s) commit another murder, who takes responsibility? I would argue the people releasing a convicted murderer should - a sort of reverse of the Chinese(?) saying that somebody who saves a persons life then becomes responsible for that person [and his/her (hes? hir? actions].

L Burns

Seeing as I'm the author of this piece, perhaps I should say something.

There is far too much killing in the world, period. There is also something fundamentally wrong about deliberately setting out to take a life, whether as a murder or in the ritualised setting of a judicial hanging. Surely, if killing is wrong, why should murder be treated as an exception, the only crime in which two wrongs could be said to make a 'right'? An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.

Besides this general objections, there's also a more specific one. Derek Bentley should not have been hanged. It's not me saying that: it's the Appeal Court. The reason he was hanged was because a policeman was killed, and this was seen as a particularly heinous crime in that it was seen as an indirect assault upon the institutions of the Crown. As for me, I don't see why the life of a policeman should be any more valuable than that of anyone else: it's a difficult and dangerous job but they get well paid for it and they know the risks when they join the service.

Well, I now agree with Ford's Towel and part of Thumpy Eck. For the latter, yep, don't like killing etc. I'm still in blessed ignorance about the legal case in question but the fact that an Appeals Court says that somebody shouldn't have been hanged doesn't mean that somebody was innocent and, secondly, I would argue that a policeman's life IS more valuable simply because they make a greater contribution to society. Yes they get paid for it if pittance can be called pay [this is based on Australian rates, maybe in the UK they start @ 80kpound/pa].

But if you're comparing a policeman who does the really icky stuff that nobody wants to do with a media person [let's leave out hairdressers for the moment :] whose life is based around things like making advertisements trying to convince us that out lives would be ever so improved by wearing a plastic[well, alright, surgical steel if you must] snot ring and gets paid 50 times more than the policeman for that, my vote goes to the policeman's life being worth more every time.

Maybe we could start a list of professions ranked by 'value' to society [if we put a column associating average pay levels, we could test the proposition that the ranking is inversely proportion to pay].

Perhaps start a trend valuing people by what they do rather that the number of dollars [pounds for the poms] they have/get. And coming second is good... And ...

L.Burns

So, if in cold blood a policeman intentionally shot a suspect who was posing no threat to anyone whatsoever but who had a criminal record, then he should be automatically spared the death penalty despite having committed murder by any other name. But if it were the converse situation then the suspect should hang?

Somehow, after the countless miscarriages of justice we've seen occur in the name of the law over the years (Guildford Four, Birmingham Six, Stefan Kiszko...and now Barry George) I can't see this getting passed today's sceptical public.

That one may consider one persons life to be more valuable than anothers doesn't make the first person's life immune to blame.

There is always a problem with hypotheticals and or focussing on the one case in a thousand, the human race almost certainly will continue to make mistakes, kill people intentionally, semi-intentionally and unintentionally. I'm continually puzzled by the fact that there appears to be more sympathy for a perpetrator who comes from a poor/abused/etc/etc background and who mercilessly bludgeons someone to death than there is for a victim who may have had an equally unforgiving background.

Back to your hypothetical: if the policeman had the intent and preparation to kill specifically that victim, then the policeperson should be charged with murder, in the other circumstances the pp should be charged with manslaughter. It should be noted how perceptions change in the full glare of hindsight.

Lu Burns

" I'm continually puzzled by the fact that there appears to be more sympathy for a perpetrator who comes from a poor/abused/etc/etc background and who mercilessly bludgeons someone to death than there is for a victim who may have had an equally unforgiving background."

I'm not, because I don't see this happening in actuality. I don't think society has gone soft in that way. Getting back to Bentley, he was not regarded in this way whatsoever. He was regarded sympathetically becasue it was plain to anyone that he was *not* a perpetrator and *didn't* commit the crime of murder, being that he had been under arrest for fifteen minutes.

I should have said I'm relating from experience in Australia, I've seen people outside court having a giggle about how well they faked tears, a magistrate saying, on sentencing, ~I note that this is the 17th time you have appeared before this court and I warn you that, if this happens again, it will be taken very seriously. As for the victims, they don't crack a mention. Mind you, there are no deaths in these cases but seeing the long lasting effect on my mother after her flat was burgled and robbed and I suspect that her reaction was not unusual.

On the physical violence side, it largely seems to be a function of the media. The boy who was thrashed and raped for 7hr and dumped in the street after somebody 'thought' the boy may have taken his mobile phone, paragraph on p17, some detail on the miscreants [can't remember but abusive families, drink, etc etc, the usual sort of thing], the boy was just a boy.

I suppose this may be the nub of it - every excuse is found for the perpetrator [regardless of how many people do well having come from the same type of background/life experiences] but the victim is just a victim, they, and their families may suffer for decades without recognition or recompense. [slides off soapbox...]

Fair point.

No one had commented on this article in a while so I thought i would start it up again.
Earlier it was said that jury and judge should not be accused of manslaughter for an incorrect death penalty - this is correct however it would make sense for manslaughter to be introduced if jury or judge failed in their actions.
The judge in this case failed to give a fair trial and then failed to pass on the plea for mercy to the home secretary, therefore i would suggest that he should have faced a manslaughter charge.
Where a juryman/woman or the judge to push for a death penalty for a personal reason (justified or not) then they should face a murder charge - 1st or 2nd class depending on their "reason"
I hope that this thread's conversation will restart and please; keep it civil

Reasonable enough although the proof of 'negligence' or 'malice' would have to be done without bringing in the benefit of hindsight - not so easy to do.

You could also extend this so that if somebody was wrongly found not guilty and recommitted the crime, then the judge/jury etc (even the police in theory for not finding sufficient evidence if it was found to have happened by negligence on their part)could be found guilty of murder/manslaughter a a result of their actions/lack of action.

Brings consequences into a whole new light.

Interesting . . . But it does start to become like the (logically horrendous) world of Minority Report.