Sara Sharif murder: ‘sadist’ father and stepmother jailed for life

[Rompipalle]

So it isn't used that way now. Are you saying it couldn't be?

Most drugs are problematic when taken orally for suicide, for the reasons given. There are certainly enough successful suicides with it to suggest that it would be effective in the correct dose, which I imagine qualified professionals would be in a better position to calculate than a would-be suicide.

BIB - I'm not sure what you're asking here, so I apologise if I am not answering your question.

It would be tricky to make someone take the drug orally - and it would likely be an even bigger shambles than trying to administer it intravenously. I don't believe that any ethical qualified professionals would be agreeable to participate in any aspect of the process - even if only calculating the appropriate dosage. It runs counter to the entire of ethos of "doing no harm" to others.

 

[8ball]

Answers may be found further upthread.

 

[Pickman's model]

Answers may be found further upthread.

Indeed they may. But not in your posts, not to my question

 

[8ball]

Indeed they may. But not in your posts, not to my question

I understand you are acquainted with Spy IRL.

If you ask nicely I’m confident he will be willing to explain it to you slowly at your next visit to a no doubt reputable hostelry.

That said, if you think I have misread something, a concise re-stating of the question would allow me to answer without reference to prior posts.

 

[Spymaster]

I have.

Not of the principle of proportionality of sentencing being subverted by legislation.

 

[Pickman's model]

I understand you are acquainted with Spy IRL.

If you ask nicely I’m confident he will be willing to explain it to you slowly at your next visit to a no doubt reputable hostelry.

Yeh, sometimes listening to spy is like those times in black adder where Edmund is trying to worm his way out of something and speaks really slowly as he comes out with an excuse only a lobotomised gibbon would believe.

 

[8ball]

Yeh, sometimes listening to soy is like those times in black adder where Edmund is trying to worm his way out of something and speaks really slowly as he comes out with an excuse only a lobotomised gibbon would believe.

Ok. Well all I meant was that I am confident that most people support the idea of a scaled relationship between severity of crime and punishment.

It is not in dispute that we may quibble significantly depending on our personal political and moral persuasions.

Edit: also, I think calling him “soy” is possibly fighting talk

 

[VivaE]

It's always asked but it's not particularly useful because there's no universal agreement on it, or even the order of importance of the various parts of it.

As you said before, probably the most important element is incapacitation; to protect people from the criminal. Rehabilitation is another, but you'll get scores of opinions on that; same with deterrence. The part where I think you lose your way on this is the principle of retribution (vengeance/punishment). Someone else, VivaE I think, said that the only reason for CP was vengeance. That's wrong, but vengeance/retribution is a huge part of punishment/justice and always has been. We generally believe that any punishment should be proportionate to the crime committed. That's why there are different types of it. If we didn't believe that, everyone would receive the same sentence regardless of what they've done.

So societal vengeance/retribution, is dialled in to every sentence and is a completely intrinsic factor of justice. All that we disagree about is how far it should go.

I said nothing of the sort. My vengeance comment relates entirely to those feeling that a life without parole sentence (and all the deprivations that accompany it) is still insufficient punishment for a crime of this calibre.

Nothing to do with CP, everything to do with people high-fiving over Urfan Sharif getting slashed in the neck with a tuna tin cover and seeing it as him getting his just deserts.

You tend to ignore context, you did it earlier in relation to another post of mine. It's annoying.

 

[Spymaster]

I said nothing of the sort. My vengeance comment relates entirely to those feeling that a life without parole sentence (and all the deprivations that accompany it) is still insufficient punishment for a crime of this calibre.

Nothing to do with CP, everything to do with people high-fiving over Urfan Sharif getting slashed in the neck with a tuna tin cover and seeing it as him getting his just deserts.

You tend to ignore context, you did it earlier in relation to another post of mine. It's annoying.

Ok. I took this ...

Anyone needing anything on top of the grim reality of effectively life without parole and all that entails is driven by a personal need for vengeance rather than justice imo.

... to be a comment on CP, rather than slashing attacks in prisons. An understandable assumption given that the flow of the thread had become heavily weighted towards capital punishment and you hadn't provided the context that you just have.

If you don't want to be annoyed by being taken out of context, you need to be clearer.

Do you feel that vengeance has no place in punishment though?

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

In addition, the ghoulish spectacle of having the execution witnessed is positively medieval - and it's particularly the case when it is botched so frequently. I think it was decided a long time ago in most "westernised societies" (for want of an better term) that execution was not a spectator sport and I believe this still to be the case.

Disagree; if the state is going to do this in the name of the people, the people should be made to watch, to see justice being done in their name.

 

[Spymaster]

Edit: also, I think calling him “soy” is possibly fighting talk

It's his accent.

Pickman's is closely related to Worzel Gummidge.

 

[Rompipalle]

Disagree; if the state is going to do this in the name of the people, the people should be made to watch, to see justice being done in their name.

I'm not sure how anyone can MADE to watch, unless everyone is tied up and their eyelids forced apart...

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

I'm not sure how anyone can MADE to watch, unless everyone is tied up and their eyelids forced apart...

View attachment 458441

Yep, just like that.

 

[Jeff Robinson]

As I understand it, the most popular theory of criminal punishment amongst criminal law scholars and philosophers is so-called 'negative retributivism'. The basic idea is this: the goals of punishment should be exclusively forward-looking (rehabilitation, incapacitation, deterrence, compensation, restoration etc). However, these forward-looking goals have to be constrained by considerations of proportionality to avoid things like excessive punishment and punishment of the innocent (e.g. framing an innocent person for consequentialist reasons). Negative retributivism, in other words, is not concerned with dolling out the right amount of suffering to the guilty but about ensuring that nobody is made to suffer unnecessarily.

At the theoretical level, this approach makes sense to me. I personally have strong retributivist impulses, but on considered reflection I realise that these impulses are unjustified and I certainly wouldn't want a criminal justice system based on them. As a social mammal I'm probably evolutionarily predisposed to want to see transgressors of social norms get their just desserts, but inflicting pain and suffering as an end in itself to somehow balance the scales of justice really isn't a plausible view when you think about it. As littlebabyjesus put it, an eye for an eye makes the world blind. What we really want, or at least what we really ought to want, is accountability for wrong-doers, justice for victims, protection for the wider public and, where possible, reform of the offender (the latter is rather far-fetched in this case of course).

Obviously cases like this one are hard. What the murderers and their accomplices did is just so radically evil, so depraved, that it's perfectly natural to have a strong impulse that they should be made to suffer and maybe suffer terribly. But when you step a bit back from that impulse and think about it, it doesn't seem terribly attractive.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Justice for victims is tricky as that is going to vary hugely by victim and also by when the victim is considered within the process. Just after you have had a crime committed against you, your reaction is going to be very different from, say, a year or two later, when you both sit down in the same room and you confront the now-remorseful perpetrator and explain the impact of the crime to them.

So of course this doesn't apply in this case, but it applies generally in an enormous amount of cases - restoratative justice, making amends, understanding the true consequences of what you did. If we actually want to improve the situation, all of these should be central to the system.

And think about why people are being banged up. To protect the rest of us from them is the compelling reason to do it. Should we be doing it at all in other cases? What alternative ways are there to achieve truly restoratative justice? Most offenders need help and refusing them that help only harms the rest of us even more.

Extreme cases don't make for good ideas about general principles. Sometimes someone needs to be locked up because what they did was so awful that they cannot be allowed to continue in society, and in rare cases that needs to be for the rest of their lives. I would still argue, even in these cases, that some attempt should be made to engage with those individuals. For our sake as much as for theirs. To search for understanding as to how this appalling situation came to happen.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

And yes, resisting the impulse to inflict pain out of revenge. To put it bluntly, that's how we show that we're better than them. Refusing to counter violence with more violence.

Not hippy bollocks. Actually a pretty difficult thing to do sometimes.

 

[Lotte]

I still don't really understand why fellow prisoners take it into their own hands to exact revenge for crimes that have nothing to do with them, thereby increasing their own sentence.

Revealed: Killer 'who viciously attacked Sara Sharif's father'

It is alleged the inmates were sickened by his abuse of the 10-year-old schoolgirl, who was hooded, bitten, burned and eventually beaten to death.

www.dailymail.co.uk

I guess he knew he wasn't ever getting out.

Shock horror: man who attacks disgusting, violent abuser is also a disgusting, violent abuser.

ETA because the original post was unnecessarily cunty, as was the rape comment. But my general point still stands. Sansom is not a hero.

 

[Spymaster]

As I understand it, the most popular theory of criminal punishment amongst criminal law scholars and philosophers is so-called 'negative retributivism'. The basic idea is this: the goals of punishment should be exclusively forward-looking (rehabilitation, incapacitation, deterrence, compensation, restoration etc). However, these forward-looking goals have to be constrained by considerations of proportionality to avoid things like excessive punishment and punishment of the innocent (e.g. framing an innocent person for consequentialist reasons). Negative retributivism, in other words, is not concerned with dolling out the right amount of suffering to the guilty but about ensuring that nobody is made to suffer unnecessarily.

At the theoretical level, this approach makes sense to me. I personally have strong retributivist impulses, but on considered reflection I realise that these impulses are unjustified and I certainly wouldn't want a criminal justice system based on them. As a social mammal I'm probably evolutionarily predisposed to want to see transgressors of social norms get their just desserts, but inflicting pain and suffering as an end in itself to somehow balance the scales of justice really isn't a plausible view when you think about it. As littlebabyjesus put it, an eye for an eye makes the world blind. What we really want, or at least what we really ought to want, is accountability for wrong-doers, justice for victims, protection for the wider public and, where possible, reform of the offender (the latter is rather far-fetched in this case of course).

Obviously cases like this one are hard. What the murderers and their accomplices did is just so radically evil, so depraved, that it's perfectly natural to have a strong impulse that they should be made to suffer and maybe suffer terribly. But when you step a bit back from that impulse and think about it, it doesn't seem terribly attractive.

Negative retributivism is not the most popular theory. It's just one of many.

As you go on to say, it holds that people should not be punished if the punishment would have no positive effect (deterrence, containment, or rehabilitation). Obviously, it immediately gets shaky on deterrence grounds, though the deterrent aspect of punishment is itself hotly debated.

Let's take an example of a CEO who defrauds his firms pension fund and steals millions from the workers. I'd be very surprised if the vast majority of U75 members would not want to see him imprisoned. Most would want far worse!

Containment for public protection isn’t an issue. The public doesn’t require protection. All we need to do to keep this guy from reoffending is to prevent him from having access to pension funds again, and that’s easy. Rehabilitation isn’t an issue either. We seek to rehabilitate offenders to prevent them from reoffending but if we’ve removed his ability to reoffend, the issue is moot. There's a possible case for sending him to prison as an example to other CEOs to deter them from robbing pension funds, but the same people who champion negative retributivism are often the ones same ones who tell us that harsher sentencing is not a deterrent. Obviously I disagree with them, but it's a common thing.

So why send the CEO to prison?

Does anyone here think that Robert Maxwell should not have gone to prison if he'd lived?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Let's take an example of a CEO who defrauds his firms pension fund and steals millions from the workers. I'd be very surprised if the vast majority of U75 members would not want to see him imprisoned. Most would want far worse!

Permanent loss of a bunch of privileges. The level of privileges lost depending on the level of damage caused. 10 years or 20 years even of community service. This CEO is going to be cleaning drains for the rest of his life.

I can only repeat. I think we need a radical rethink about what prison is actually for.

 

[Spymaster]

Permanent loss of a bunch of privileges. The level of privileges lost depending on the level of damage caused. 10 years or 20 years even of community service. This CEO is going to be cleaning drains for the rest of his life.

Why though?

Why do you want to punish him at all?

He can't reoffend or harm anyone else again.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

He needs to make amends. And there need to be consequences for actions. But this is not synomymous with revenge.

 

[Spymaster]

He needs to make amends. And there need to be consequences for actions. But this is not synomymous with revenge.

That is absolutely vengeance/retribution.

Why does there need to be consequences for his actions?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

That is absolutely vengeance/retribution.

Why does there need to be consequences for his actions?

No it's not. Your questions are not as interesting as you think they are. A parent disciplining a child is not exacting vengeance or retribution.

 

[Spymaster]

No it's not. Your questions are not as interesting as you think they are. A parent disciplining a child is not exacting vengeance or retribution.

A parent disciplining a child is invoking deterrence and attempting rehabilitation; the first of which you have argued in the past is ineffective, the latter unnecessary in the CEO scenario.

And yet again with the insults. You do this a lot when you can't answer questions and get all flustered.

I'm being perfectly polite to you, so why not just answer the question?

Why does there need to be consequences for actions?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

A parent disciplining a child is invoking deterrence and attempting rehabilitation; the first of which you have argued in the past is ineffective, the latter unnecessary in the CEO scenario.

And yet again with the insults. You do this a lot when you can't answer questions and get all flustered.

I'm being perfectly polite to you, so why not just answer the question?

Why does there need to be consequences for actions?

I'm not flustered. I gave you an answer. And you appear to be invoking some badly rememebered post by me in the past.

If I were inclined to be rude, I'd say that your contributions to this thread have been a fucking disgrace. Turning things around again and again and again to your favoured hobby horses.

 

[Spymaster]

If I were inclined to be rude, I'd say that your contributions to this thread have been a fucking disgrace. Turning things around again and again and again to your favoured hobby horses.

That's not being rude, it's just imbecilic.

I'm simply replying to yours and others posts, and yours are as full of holes as ever.

It should be noted however, that you attempt to engage with me right up to the point where things get a bit tricky for you, then you throw your toys out of the pram and my contributions suddenly become a fucking disgrace!

You've studiously avoided answering the question about consequences for actions because you've realised that doing so will blow an irredeemable hole in your boat, and you've resorted to ad hominem instead.

Perhaps we should leave it there.

 

[Larry O'Hara]

Spymaster has to be commended for sticking to his guns on this thread: his posts are always interesting. Sadly they dont give out hobnobs any more? Would gladly buy him a drink..

 

[Spymaster]

Spymaster has to be commended for sticking to his guns on this thread: his posts are always interesting. Sadly they dont give out hobnobs any more? Would gladly buy him a drink..

And I would happily reciprocate

 

[8ball]

That is absolutely vengeance/retribution.

Why does there need to be consequences for his actions?

You said it yourself further below that it is invoking deterrence and attempting rehabilitation.

That’s not the same as vengeance.

There also seems to be an assumption (on the thread in general), that revenge and retributive punishment are fundamentally the same, which is a niche view.

 

[Spymaster]

You said it yourself further below that it is invoking deterrence and attempting rehabilitation.

That’s not the same as vengeance.

The need to make amends and for there to be consequences for actions, is invoking deterrence and attempting rehabilitation?

How?

There also seems to be an assumption (on the thread in general), that revenge and retributive punishment are fundamentally the same, which is a niche view.

How would you say they differ, other than in who's doing it?