This comes up fairly often and we haven't had a thread on the topic in awhile, so what say you?

 

 

I've changed. Just a few years ago I'd have said kill 'em all, who cares. Now a days I'm not even sure how I feel about the death penalty. Sure there are always gonna be psychopaths that should be put down but I think most people deserve a chance to make amends for what they've done, not just strapped to a board and injected with State approved murder chemicals. This is probably best suited for discussion in it's own thread.

I'd say it's a mess at the moment anyway.

 

How so? You could say it's ineffectual, or it's flawed, or it's wrong, but how is it a mess in the way that judging the severity of punishment on a sliding, ambiguous scale of the quality of evidence would be a mess?

How so?

Based on news reports that show there is no consistency in sentencing and that the more severe the crime doesn't automatically mean a more severe sentence.

 

For example, a guy with over 100 burglary convictions and has never been jailed appears before a judge again and is still not given a custodial sentence, whereas someone who commits a more white collar crime is sentenced to a period of time in prison. This has actually happened.

 

Other examples include a guy who beat up his girlfriend to the point of endangering her life and threatened to kill her (in front of the police) not getting a custodial sentence, only to then kill her a few weeks later.

 

Of course, these are extreme examples, but are atypical of the lack of consistency and lack of actually dealing with an issue.

 

Not to mention that if someone breaks into my home and I defend it to the point of injuring the person, there is more chance of me getting a custodial sentence for violence than the burglar for breaking in.

 

It's the lack of consistency, the softly-softly approach and the apparent unwillingness to actually imprison people who deserve to lose their freedom.

 

All of this is before we even get to the farce that the European Court of Human Rights grew to be and how that has been used for the most frivolous of cases, such as prisoners suing for compensation (and winning) for sometimes ridiculously inane reasons. Criminals appealing deportation and winning because they have a girlfriend. Where it should be "well, you should have thought of that before you committed a crime", it's more like "oh, sorry about that; we didn't know".

 

There are more reasons, but I think it boils down to there being no consistency in sentencing, no apparent "tier" of sentencing lengths dependant on the crime committed and that the rights of the criminal appear to take precedent over the rights of the victim.

Where's the mess in that though? All of those cases are about laws being too soft, human rights abuses, and an over emphasis on offenders rights, none of that really demonstrates a lack of consistency, it demonstrates a consistent lack of severity, or a punishment structure that you disagree with (self defence > burglary, white collar freud > theft, to use your examples). That's not a mess, it's a system that you, and me, and lots of other people, disagree with, but it's a system with a set of rules that it follows, that's not at all the same as a system where quality of evidence is used as the basis of sentencing which would be unimaginably undefinable and convoluted.