Posts by BenWilson
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WH that seems to be saying the opposite of what I'm driving at. It sort of says that criminals have a "criminal mindset", much more than they have any particular hangups with particular forms of law-breaking. Interesting, indeed.
It has to be remembered that there are several purposes of imprisonment, and rehabilitation is only one of them. Another is to remove them from society to protect society, and I think that's the thinking behind 3 strikes - that you've proved you're crooked beyond repair, so the best thing for society is to keep you in a cage for as long as possible. There's some merit to this way of thinking, but 3 strikes still seems pretty arbitrary to me. That thinking was already captured within the range of sentences available to a judge, who could decide how far beyond repair any particular person found guilty is. Then again, the way Graeme is telling it, that range will still be available, it's just extended in terms of how harsh the treatment of a 3rd striker can be. So it's still on judges to set the standards for how fair these laws and practices can be.
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Top use of vocabulary, that man
Say what?
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A lawyer who was a bit rough on an interlocutor? I've never heard of that being a discouraged habit. Just because Graeme has good manners doesn't make it an industry standard.
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Ben, certainly you're right about the pattern, but you should also remember that it's two acts of paedophilia serious enough to warrant a five year prison term (on separate occasions). It doesn't deal with the pattern issue, but it does slightly mitigate the injustice.
For sure, it's a pattern of criminal behavior. What I'm driving at, in a nutshell, is that just as all crimes are not equal, so also not all patterns are. It seems to me that repeating the same serious offense over and over is more of a justification for harsher sentencing than three completely different (although perhaps just as serious) crimes. At least in the latter case you could argue that they did learn from their past mistakes, that the punishments they received did act as future deterrence. I'm not standing by this position, btw, I just don't think it's settled anywhere near as clearly as a three strikes rule seems to suggest. Essentially I think it's overly simplistic.
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Or even do what boxers do, sit around in a sauna all the previous day, and turn up with massive dehydration, followed by a massive fluid and carbo loading session immediately after the weigh-in.
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Graeme, righto then substitute in manslaughter in place of aggravated assault in my point. 2 acts of pedophilia, then manslaughter, doesn't really hint at a pattern, where it may for 3 consecutive manslaughters, particularly if they're done in very similar ways.
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I especially like the “You have to save something with a face” comment.
I think the corollary is true, too, that the best villain has no face. We did not see Sylar's actual face until near the end of the first series and he definitely creeped me out all the more for it. After last night's episode I came away sort of thinking "OK so the supervillain is a slightly weedy looking guy who's actually righteously bitter about the company having deliberately made him a monster". It doesn't matter how odd looking someone is, when you see them, they are humanized. We've seen so much of Sylar, indeed we have even seen him turn good, that it's just going to be hard to fear and hate him now. They need a new supercreep.
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you could still end up imprisoned for life for a (icky and indicative of some really weird psychological shit) consensual sex act between adults. In what way does this help society? Really?
Especially if they're brothers, and they end up in the same prison ;-)
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That's some interesting research! I must say, from my years of playing sports, that I found crowds didn't seem to influence the fairness much. They did increase the excitement and motivation of the players of both teams. But it's interesting that the empty stadium led to more calls against the locals. Was this 'inverse bias' on the referee, or the players, though? Perhaps they did actually foul more at home. A crowd might temper this, as it did in games I played - it's pretty demotivating to doing a professional foul (I played waterpolo which is basically all about professional fouls), when there's a roar from the crowd, whether it's for or against the foul. Generally, you'd rather it was just unnoticed.
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correction: in "with respect to the particular crimes they are accused of", substitute "accused" for "found guilty".
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