Baby was sexually abused before being killed by man adopting him, court told
Boy died aged 13 months after ‘routine abuse’ by Jamie Varley and his partner, John McGowan-Fazakerley, jury hears
We do not have the death penalty any more. Well, except that meted out by prisoners themselves.
a secondary school teacher
Sacrificed on the altar of modernity.
I have been opposed to the death penalty for many many years, but it’s cases like this that make me question my opinion……
Capital punishment is social hygiene.
Looking at reoffending stats, Thomas Sowell points out that if your goal is to minimise murder then you execute all murderers, because the number killed by reoffenders utterly dwarfs the number of murderers wrongly convicted and executed. Trade-offs.
Not a lot of comfort there for those wrongly convicted and executed Norm…….
They no longer need earthly comforts tho
True, Otto, but trade-offs. If you want to preserve those wrongly convicted you’re going to get rather more murders. Whose lives are worth more? It’s all a bit Trolley Problem, isn’t it?
It’s an imaginary problem. The cause celebre was Derek Bentley, wasn’t it? The “let him have it” guy.
Well, allow me to introduce a new jurisprudential theory: I don’t give a fuck about Derek Bentley. He was a criminal, up to no good, and deserved to have his neck stretched. Criminals should be made to fear the law.
He was convicted under the principle of joint enterprise; he went there with intent to commit a crime and knew there was a weapon involved. The ambiguity over what he meant by “Let him have it” wasn’t a good enough reason to find him not guilty.
With the right protocols – eg without a minimum of two pieces of forensic evidence + other evidence, no death penalty – no-one would be wrongly executed, but the deterrent effect would remain.
Process is not a safeguard against incompetence or malice.
The vast majority of convictions in the criminal justice system are sound. Raising the evidential bar to a higher level for sentences of death would make the chances of executing someone innocent vanishingly small. Under my suggested protocol, Lucy Letby would live but Ian Huntley would have been executed. And, as Norman says above, “if your goal is to minimise murder then you execute all murderers, because the number killed by reoffenders utterly dwarfs the number of murderers wrongly convicted and executed.”
I’m not convinced about the deterrent effect, Theo, but I am convinced that an executed murderer can no longer kill, or be a drain on social resources.
Th executed murderer cannot kill, but the uncaught murderer who knows they face the death penalty if caught is exceptionally strongly motivated to kill again to avoid being caught. It’s not like we can kill them twice for another murder.
A colossally stupid argument.
…the uncaught murderer who knows they face the death penalty if caught is exceptionally strongly motivated to kill again to avoid being caught.
If that’s true, which I doubt, the motivation “to kill again to avoid being caught” would apply in a small number of circumstances and to a small number of people.
The small number of circumstances being those in which an original murder occurred. Or are you suggesting that there is a huge amount of murder currently?
Deterrence of any crime requires severe sentences and a high probability of being caught and sentenced. I agree the death penalty alone is not a deterrent.
All the research done on the subject points to the main deterrent being the ‘possibility of getting caught’ rather than the severity of the sentence that might be imposed if you are caught…
The deterrent effect of punishment is vastly over rated. You only have to have known some criminals to know that. They don’t expect to get captured. Look at some of the less serious crimes. How many people have got a clean driving license? Points on a license mean a criminal offense has been committed. Say speeding. How many people continue to exceed speed limits after being convicted of the offense? How many people collect points up to losing the license?
Death is nothing. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
Ditto
I certainly wouldn’t be joining any crowd funding to have a death penalty reduced to whole life in this case.
Where was that precautionary principle when they started giving gay couples very young kids to adopt? Surely there’s a heightened risk compared to stable hetero couples who want to adopt a baby and miss out because of bien pensant policies?
They were too busy worrying about UKIP leaflets to think about other risks.
Noticing increases…
People like the near unimpeachable Mark (Longrider) argue quite eloquently on this and I can’t impeach their logic. Given the total incompetence of the state and the fact its remit needs to be cut back by about 80% then it’s tough to justify the death penalty, even in the appalling scenario outlined.
I would reinstate the death penalty but with a very narrow remit – so would come back for treason and piracy on the high seas. I’d add in people trafficking. Obviously the entirety of the current government need the gallows as a matter of principle. I’d also allow the use of ‘Bills of Attainder’ so in the case of these offences the perpetrator’s entire family can share their guilt. Might concentrate a few minds.
What I would advocate is the repeal of the HRA and then using the DFID budget to ‘transport’ these prisoners to a jurisdiction like North Korea – where they’d hopefully suffer a similar fate to that our host outlines.
Quite so. The state cannot be trusted.
When it comes down to it – people can’t be trusted. We’re all fallible creatures.
Make it optional – normal trial for murder or whatever, normal sentence. Then if the judge so chooses he can tell the jury to consider the death penalty. The decision would be based on the chances of rehabilitation, so for the Stockport chap probably not much chance (if I had done that I would want to be dead).
Something that never happens.
So why does it keep happening?
P.s. it’s always a little boy.
This is going to be a tragic isolated incident and definitely not indicative of an organised sex trafficking setup. Oh no.
It’s always the ones you most suspect.
No doubt there are honest decent scoutmasters, vicars and children’s home staff. But anyone seeking such a job, looking after children other than their own, should be subject to real examination before and frequent observation after being employed.
I have a crazy idea, how about we don’t let adult male homosexuals have unsupervised access to little boys?
This.
Indeed. When the Church in France investigated, this is what they found:
An estimated 330,000 children were victims of sex abuse within France’s Catholic Church over the past 70 years…..The head of the French bishops’ conference asked for forgiveness from the victims, about 80% of whom were boys
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/05/1043302348/france-catholic-church-sexual-abuse-report-children
There’s a Wiki page looking at child abuse by the Catholic Church in every Europeans country, it’s a very long page.
The Protestant Church is no better, as DW reported:
I think you’ll find that hanging pedos is an ecumenical matter
Seems as if the ‘Church’, along with the other groups mentioned by rk above, attracts sexual predators, likely because they know they will have access to the weak and vulnerable…..
… and all those cute little choirboys.
My general observation is that men don’t particularly care about being around other people’s children.
Which doesn’t mean they won’t be good to them (I fix up my nieces and nephews laptops). But when I meet them I doubt we exchange more than a dozen words. I see it with uncles and my kids too. Where women absolutely love seeing nephews and nieces.
Guide packs are full of young women helping out who don’t have children but nearly all the men have kids in the pack.
Another point, one that is unpopular these days, is that this was an adoption by two men. It’s not the first such case and it is an argument for refusing such adoptions. Call me old fashioned but a child should be raised by a man and a woman, a mother and a father. It’s not a 100% guarantee of success, of course, but better than this.
Speaking of institutionalised child grooming, here’s the EU:
Hungary violated EU law when it banned children from accessing LGBTQ+ content, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled Tuesday, ordering Budapest to scrap the legislation.
And then, one day, for no reason at all…
And, of course, the organisation(s) that got them the babbie to begin with got off scot-free…
“lessons have been learned”. “tragic oversight”. “procedures were followed”. etc….
Where’s the follow-up into the incompetents who actualy allowed this to happen?
Well, we were talking about capital punishment earlier…
Is this type of story going to keep recurring like the migrant rape stories to the extent that I forget details of individual cases or think I’ve already read of a particular case and it turns out it’s a different crime with remarkably similar details but nevertheless a different tragic crime.
If only there were some patterns that could be observed that would help us avoid future tragedies.