This grates with me. It's my understanding, that as a matter of policy most major media…

We do. But given that people have asked for the case to be looked at again, should police ignore a prime suspect?

One way of the re-look going is surely: police have looked at the evidence again,…

We do:
No one who has been finally acquitted or convicted of, or pardoned for, an offence shall be tried or punished for it again.

Well, that's not accurate. The Police can't require anything like that.

classic misdirection

You could interpret what he said as meaning that spying on nonresidents isn't against the crimes act.

Bt if those anonymous ‘coupla mistake-making GCSB agents’ weren’t acting deliberately, why, they must have…

Yes, they accidentally intended to take action against someone whose residency they didn't check, and they did! Case dismissed!

The most amazing part in Key's announcement is that he used the word deliberately...deliberately...and even deliberated it to the point of pronouncing every syllable.

Here we have participant A handing participant B ammunition to use in weapons only available to participant B.

Participant B dutifully uses ammunition , as requested by participant…

http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/18720126/key-backs-police-decision-on-dotcom-spying/

So that's that then I guess.

Bloody law and order types!

There's no blood in that. No satisfaction of the commentariat's visceral desire for vengeance.

You know that the (acting) Head of the GCSB at the time of the interception lost his job, right?

If I had made the outlandish claim “having consensual sex isn’t a crime” would you have responded “But it can be. Under the Crimes Act, s.130 … [it can be incest]”?

If I had done so, would I be wrong?

All I was doing was tweaking your tail ... no…

'In Zimbabwe police have raided newspaper offices after the Prime Minister made a complaint about journalists. The ruling party alleged the journalist was a member of an opposition party attempting to smear the government..."

"In Zimbabwe a government minister previously granted extraordinary powers to deal with an emergency…

"GCSB staff also did not follow their own internal processes in actioning the OFCANZ requests."

You can't claim to be simply following orders when you aren't following orders.

I am fairly sure that if your supervisors have legal advice that what you are being directed to do is legal you have a fairly good defence if some other pointy headed lawyer then decided it might not be…

Cool. Thanks for that, Graeme.

Can be charged is not the same as are guilty of. The additional requirement of dangerousness is highly likely to be present, but still must be proved.

No. The manslaughter convictions of John Horrell (who owned an aircraft maintenance company), and Ronald Potts (who was a senior engineer at that company),…

If all you have is speeding, you haven't committed a criminal offence. You must not only have speed, you must also have danger.

But sufficient speed in and of itself is always deemed "dangerous" – meaning that your original claim "Speeding isn't a criminal offence" was technically incorrect and so…

Civil liability in court for the department as a whole, and employment liability for individuals .

Loss of employment…

And it's quite possible to have danger without having speed. If you're doing 90km/h on the open road when it's foggy, been snowing, and there are black-ice warning signs, despite not exceeding the speed limit you will almost certainly…

Isn’t there always an intent requirement for manslaughter, in that you always have to have intended to do whatever it was that resulted in the death? It’s the difference between a construction worker tripping and knocking a concrete…

I refer you to Brooker's Transportation Law, which, with appropriate references, notes:

__To justify a dangerous driving conviction, there must be not only a situation which is objectively dangerous, but also some fault on the driver's…

In my head I keep wanting to compare this with the '95…

Double points!!

;- )

Speeding isn’t a criminal offence.

But it can be. Under the Land Transport Act , s.7(2): A person may not drive a motor vehicle, or cause a motor vehicle to be driven, at a speed or in a manner which, having regard to all the circumstances, is or might be…

1. The police got the law wrong;
2. That's ok.

I say, damn straight, if the GCSB can't be above the law, who the hell can be?

Just what point(s) are you trying to make, Graeme?

Why not? Someone at the the GCSB ordered an illegal wiretap. They didn't order it because they were mistaken about the facts…

I would guess that most of it has some intent requirement. Certainly almost all of the serious ones have an intent requirement with respect to some aspect of the charge.…

I would disagree on the grounds that:
– Based on the documents released, the police and GCSB appear to have had a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude to Dotcom's residence status. Given that…

Very roughly, what part of the law of the requires 'intent'? Is it a small fraction, or a large one?

If I kill someone, and there is intent, it's murder. Without intent, it's manslaughter.…

Got to the end of writing a post saying pretty much what you've said, then discovered you'd said pretty much what I had just said. So I posted it anyway: http://www.pundit.co.nz/content/laws-like-the-spiders-web-catch-the-fly-and-let-the-hawk-go-free

A civil suit was filed some time ago.

That would most likely come into a civil claim. It would be part of a criminal charge if one was laid, because a…

So who could potentially investigate the breach of sec 14 of the GCSB Act? Does this rely on a civil action being undertaken by an aggrieved party?

The police.

And isn’t the test here just intent, not criminal intent?

Yes. I happen to think the test should be criminal intent, but it's not up to me.