Sunday, December 20, 2009

'Top Judge' Wonders: Uhh... Maybe Our Lawless Scum Coddling Wasn't Such A Good Idea After All

Good News: a top judge has finally admitted that thugs are, literally, getting away with murder.

Bad News: his reasoning is a complete train wreck.
Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge declared that there should be long jail sentences for those who launch violent attacks – even if they do not mean to kill.

He said cases of ‘one-punch manslaughter’ were being treated too leniently. Greater weight should be given to the outcome of the attack than to the intention and ‘crimes which result in death should be treated more seriously
Say what? The offence is the offence. What the right is saying - and has said for years - isn't that there should be different penalties for the same crime depending on how it affects the victim, it's that when a violent headcase strikes a man in the head, death is an entirely predictable outcome of the crime, and so a murder rap is more than justified. Even Baroness 'Papers Please' Scotland gets closer to the truth:
‘If there is anyone who does not know that if you punch someone they may fall over, strike their head and then die, we should do everything possible to enlighten that person.
Or we could just kick them off the bench?

This is where rubber meets the road. The law, as passed by Parliament is quite clear that these cases are murder. It's the bewigged ones who have spent decades defining murder up to the point where anything short of flamethrowers hardly counts.

As ever, there's a wider issue here. Judges hate hate hate the mandatory life sentence for murder, but instead of doing the decent thing and resigning to campaign for a change in the law, or even just the moderately sleazy thing, and campaigning against it while still in office, what they've done instead is evade the clearly-expressed will of Parliament by tightening the definition of murder to the point of absurdity.

It's great that they're finally deciding to treat killing people as more serious than, say, tax evasion (but, say, why now instead of over the past twelve years), but it doesn't change the fact we only got here because a lawless judiciary was allowed to ignore the law of the land in favour of its own far-out lefty nonsense. Whatever happens in these particular cases, the fact remains we still have a judiciary that thinks Parliament's output comes stamped with the word 'For Information Only'.

No comments: