19 June 2005

Lock up your Grandparents

| Special G
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Canberra Times is reporting that a 78 year old man was bashed up to 30 times with an iron bar after finding an offender in his home.

Detective-Constable Mark Travers described it as a “very vicious attack on a very vulnerable member of the community”

What sort of sick f*** bashes a 78 year old with an iron bar.

To all you civil libertarians out there who think that these people can be rehabilitated, I hope you have bars on your windows.

G

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I am aware of an incident where the bloke was convicted of Assault ABH and unlawful confinement and he got a $450 fine. You can get worse from rolling through a stop sign while not wearing your seatbelt.
I am not speaking about the people who believe a fair trial is the right thing. I am speaking of those who truly believe that it is not the ‘poor druggie’s’ fault and might actually think that the first paragraph of Tools post is not sarcastic. It’s like that bloke last year who chose to do a ram raid, run from Police in a stolen car and kill himself in it – the only tragedy there is that he makes our road death statistics look bad.

G

Yup. Believing that people may just possibly be entitled to a fair trial and that little thing called evidence is entirely separate from how we treat them once the fair trial and evidence have gotten them found guilty.

I’m just saying it’s unfair to blame believers in civil liberties for stupidly lenient sentences.

The civil liberties argument is mostly about how the conviction is secured, not the sentences.

Now now, I am sure there was a perfectly good reason for this bashing, I mean the elderly victim probably startled the poor druggie type that was burglarising his house….. What is someone to do when they are put in such a confronting position by the house occupant – of course you would bash the person senseless, after all it is everybody elses fault that this person is most likely an unemployed druggie who can’t afford the going rate for a hit of Ice.

I am sure that some BS excuse will be provided to the court should this piece of work be found and he/she will be sent to WA where they will get a Naltrexone Implant (at our expense), probably escape from the treatment program and somehow manage to find their way back to Canberra.

What ever happened to drug overdoses? They just don’t happen as often as they used to!!!

Good point Simto, no one is going to agree on this one. But here I go anyway;

Why shoot someone for such a heinous act when there are far more apealing alternatives. For example, send them to Tasmania or Far North Queensland. Or even better, ship them off to Indonesia with a kilo of dope strapped to their nether regions. Once they are caught, the punishment is no longer on our consciences.

Not the same sense of satisfaction though…

Well, I’m not entirely in love with the idea of just saying “well, they’ve done this hideous thing, they’ll never be rehabilitated, let’s just shoot ’em”.

Do we need to go through the usual arguements here, or can we take it as read that we’re not going to agree on this one?

And if you do have bars on your windows I hope your dental records are up to date in the event of a fire. (Apologies to Life Support)

Seriously though G, like you say the guy is obviously very sick. Which is not to say I have any idea if re-habilitation is possible.

The whole point of being a Libertarian is not agreeing with other people, and that includes ourselves. So I’m loathe to try and speak on behalf of anyone but myself.

But I would say the civil liberty argument on this one is that no-one be punished until they have been properly tried.

Once you secure a legitimate conviction appropriate punishment is something I’m pretty neutral about.

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