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Post by Lord Emsworth on Aug 20, 2023 12:43:16 GMT
The bigger question is what are you trying to achieve in your justice system, revenge and punishment, or rehabilitation? In the case of someone like Lucy Letby, rehabilitation isn't an issue. She will be receiving a full-time term, meaning she will never walk the streets again so there is no point in attempting to rehabilitate her. Agree about Letby but more generally….?
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Post by Lord Emsworth on Aug 20, 2023 12:43:34 GMT
I remember the collective sigh of relief when Harold Shipman took his own life. The public mood was goodbye to good riddance and his death only four years into a whole life tariff saved HMP over 1.7 million pounds. Agree
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Post by politician2 on Aug 20, 2023 12:57:14 GMT
Agree about Letby but more generally….? If you're going to release people from prison, you have to rehabilitate them or scare them straight so that they don't reoffend. The ideal justice system would do both things simultaneously, but in reality they're often conflicting priorities. The other argument in favour of harsher punishments is that they deter other people from committing similar crimes.
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Post by Lord Emsworth on Aug 20, 2023 13:56:47 GMT
But do they deter people? The evidence I have seen is sketchy at best.
There are myriad reasons why people might commit a crime and many (most?) of them are far bigger than the individual. Clearly there has to be some punishment and something to deter people, but it's the next stage where in the UK we go badly wrong.
You won't need me to highlight the incredible successes that other systems achieve, and the counterproductive outcomes of our own system.
It's all such a massive missed opportunity.
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Post by politician2 on Aug 20, 2023 14:04:37 GMT
But do they deter people? The evidence I have seen is sketchy at best. I suspect they deter a certain kind of person. For example, when the Isle of Man used the birch for violent crimes, I suspect that some people thought twice before throwing the first punch. It won't do anything to deter career criminals, however: when the birch was also used in the UK, plenty of people received it and went on to notch up lengthy criminal records, for the simple reason that birching, like fines, community service and prison, was just an occupational hazard that they knew they would face sooner or later.
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Post by doug61 on Aug 20, 2023 14:53:33 GMT
Never agreed with it, lowers the State to the level of the worst criminals. Don't want to be in the same company as the countries that do it, either. The Letby case was slightly strange, with all the "I'm evil" stuff, I wondered why it took weeks for the Jury to come to a decision, would be interesting to know when they first agreed she was guilty of any of the murders and whether the time it took was more due to some cases being hard to prove or whether the "circumstantial" aspect means it took most of that time to even be convinced she killed anyone. Everyone agrees these are the most at risk patients in any hospital but they can't afford CCTV? which I can't imagine anyone could disagree with as it protects the babies and staff from false claims whilst finding killers quick.
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Post by politician2 on Aug 20, 2023 18:59:10 GMT
Everyone agrees these are the most at risk patients in any hospital but they can't afford CCTV? which I can't imagine anyone could disagree with as it protects the babies and staff from false claims whilst finding killers quick. Yes, it's extremely odd that those types of units don't have CCTV. That could have caught Letby in the act. In fact, there's a good chance she wouldn't have committed her crimes at all if she'd realised she was on CCTV.
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Post by zeopold on Aug 20, 2023 20:21:59 GMT
The Letby case will reignite the debate, obvs.
I'm against the state enacted death penalty cos it's irreversible in the case of a miscarriage of justice.
Tossing Letby, Couzens, etc in with the general prison population and letting nature take its course wouldn't bother me unduly though.
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Post by politician2 on Aug 20, 2023 20:50:17 GMT
I'm against the state enacted death penalty cos it's irreversible in the case of a miscarriage of justice. Tossing Letby, Couzens, etc in with the general prison population and letting nature take its course wouldn't bother me unduly though. Broadly the same position as mine, Zeo. I have no problems with the genuinely guilty being hanged, but the justice system is far from infallible.
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Post by smogquixote on Aug 21, 2023 16:12:53 GMT
What’s the point? It doesn’t deter murder and leads to innocent people being killed. What difference does it make if somebody dies in prison or gets hanged? Mrs. Letby ain’t ever seeing the light of day ever again, what social utility does state-sanctioned murder have? It won’t bring those kids back, nothing will.
“Though justice be thy plee, consider this: that through the course of justice, none of us should see salvation. We do beg for mercy”
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Post by Lord Emsworth on Aug 21, 2023 17:08:05 GMT
What’s the point? It doesn’t deter murder and leads to innocent people being killed. What difference does it make if somebody dies in prison or gets hanged? Mrs. Letby ain’t ever seeing the light of day ever again, what social utility does state-sanctioned murder have? It won’t bring those kids back, nothing will. “Though justice be thy plee, consider this: that through the course of justice, none of us should see salvation. We do beg for mercy” Short, succinct and compelling 👏🏼
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Post by politician2 on Aug 24, 2023 15:58:51 GMT
More evidence was published against Letby in the Daily Mail today: police believe that she wrote the code "LO" in her diary whenever she attempted or committed a murder. However, several Mail readers who are nurses themselves commented that she had bad handwriting and actually wrote "LD", which is the standard nursing terminology for a double-shift day (i.e. a Long Day); nurses enter this in their diaries so that they do not accept any other commitments for the day.
Another reader made the interesting comment that the case uncannily resembles that of Dutch nurse Lucia de Berk. Whilst I still believe that Letby is probably guilty, he's right – the resemblance is eerie.
In 2001, the paediatric unit at Juliana Children's Hospital in The Hague noticed a spike in death rates for babies. Nine of the deaths coincided with shifts worked by Lucia de Berk, and statistical analysis indicated that the odds of this being a coincidence were 342 million-to-1. Some odd entries were found in de Berk's diary: she spoke of "giving in" to her "compulsion" and theorised about different ways of killing people. When challenged about this, de Berk stated that her "compulsion" was an interest in tarot cards and the occult, which she found slightly embarrassing, and that she was planning to write a thriller and was making notes for it.
In 2003, she was convicted of four murders and three attempted murders. Erring on the side of caution, the court sentenced her only for those charges where there was forensic evidence that the babies had been poisoned and handed her a full-life term. de Berk appealed in 2004, but the sentence was upheld, with evidence being presented by a fellow prisoner that de Berk had confessed 13 murders to him; he subsequently stated that he had been lying in a bid for attention. She was additionally sentenced to compulsory psychiatric treatment, even though psychiatrists had failed to find anything wrong with her.
de Berk appealed against her psychiatric treatment and in 2006 a court concluded that she could be sentenced to compulsory psychiatric treatment in preparation for release or to a full-life term but not to both simultaneously.
In 2010, her conviction was overturned altogether when more modern forensic techniques indicated that none of her patients had been poisoned and all had died of natural causes. Further, it was discovered that the hospital's records were so sloppy that she had in fact been on holiday when several of the babies had died and could not therefore have been treating them. The court concluded that de Berk was an excellent nurse who had saved numerous lives and that the deaths had resulted from bad management and poor working practices at the hospital. She was immediately freed and handed undisclosed compensation (which must presumably have been one of the largest awards in the history of the Netherlands).
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Post by jsm on Aug 24, 2023 22:12:45 GMT
This thread is reminding me of a case that has received a lot of attention in Australia recently:
A woman once branded "Australia's worst female serial killer" has been pardoned after new evidence suggested she did not kill her four infant children. Kathleen Folbigg spent 20 years in prison after a jury found she killed sons Caleb and Patrick and daughters Sarah and Laura over a decade. But a recent inquiry heard scientists believe they may have died naturally.
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Post by politician2 on Aug 25, 2023 18:21:42 GMT
It's a strange case for sure, and I'm uncomfortable with the Procrustes' bed approach that is being taken with Letby's behaviour, with the facts being hammered into shape to support the narrative (that she is a controlling, manipulative psychopath) rather than the facts giving birth to the narrative.
She didn't destroy potentially incriminating papers even though she owned a shredder? As a psychopath, she was toying with the police and seeing whether she could outfox them even after throwing them a few crumbs. She never apologised for her actions? Psychopath. She refused to go into court to hear her sentence? Psychopath exerting control for the last time before being sent down for life.
The odd thing is that none of the newspapers have been able to dig up a single instance of a person who witnessed disturbing behaviour from her. Her close friends are confident she didn't do it. Many of her colleagues at Chester Hospital think she didn't do it (though senior management disagrees). The closest they could find to a negative opinion was one colleague who called her a "little madam" and stated that she would sometimes argue her case when given a work instruction with which she disagreed.
If she is indeed guilty, then she is one of the most dangerous people ever to appear in a British court as absolutely nobody saw this coming. On balance, I think she must be guilty, as there is forensic as well as statistical evidence against her – but then again, there was in the case of de Berk too.
One wonders how much damage her her icy and detached performance in the witness box did to her case. A famous case in English law was that of William Wallace, who was convicted of murdering his wife in 1931 on bizarre circumstantial evidence. Although the Judge all but directed the jury to acquit, they convicted him in an hour due to his indifferent performance in the witness box, during which he seemed completely disinterested in answering questions and gave the impression of being a dangerous and emotionless psychopath. Whilst the Appeal Court rarely overturned convictions on the basis that it disagreed with the jury's decision, in this case it did, with a summing-up that implied it thought the jury had taken leave of its senses. The murder has never been solved and remains one of the oddest in British legal history.
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Post by smogquixote on Aug 26, 2023 3:27:09 GMT
It's a strange case for sure, and I'm uncomfortable with the Procrustes' bed approach that is being taken with Letby's behaviour, with the facts being hammered into shape to support the narrative (that she is a controlling, manipulative psychopath) rather than the facts giving birth to the narrative. She didn't destroy potentially incriminating papers even though she owned a shredder? As a psychopath, she was toying with the police and seeing whether she could outfox them even after throwing them a few crumbs. She never apologised for her actions? Psychopath. She refused to go into court to hear her sentence? Psychopath exerting control for the last time before being sent down for life. The odd thing is that none of the newspapers have been able to dig up a single instance of a person who witnessed disturbing behaviour from her. Her close friends are confident she didn't do it. Many of her colleagues at Chester Hospital think she didn't do it (though senior management disagrees). The closest they could find to a negative opinion was one colleague who called her a "little madam" and stated that she would sometimes argue her case when given a work instruction with which she disagreed. If she is indeed guilty, then she is one of the most dangerous people ever to appear in a British court as absolutely nobody saw this coming. On balance, I think she must be guilty, as there is forensic as well as statistical evidence against her – but then again, there was in the case of de Berk too. One wonders how much damage her her icy and detached performance in the witness box did to her case. A famous case in English law was that of William Wallace, who was convicted of murdering his wife in 1931 on bizarre circumstantial evidence. Although the Judge all but directed the jury to acquit, they convicted him in an hour due to his indifferent performance in the witness box, during which he seemed completely disinterested in answering questions and gave the impression of being a dangerous and emotionless psychopath. Whilst the Appeal Court rarely overturned convictions on the basis that it disagreed with the jury's decision, in this case it did, with a summing-up that implied it thought the jury had taken leave of its senses. The murder has never been solved and remains one of the oddest in British legal history. Anything can happen in a jury case, there are simply no guarantees. Personally, if I was Miss Letby I’d have killed myself as soon as I got the opportunity to do so. Either way, the downstream legal implications of hanging scum like Rose West or Stephen Griffiths inevitably lead to innocent people being murdered by the state. Plus, it makes no difference whether murderers get buried alive in prison or get executed, either way they’re not seeing the sun again.
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