August 6th, 2011, 05:36 PM | #101 | |
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Upstate New York, where we do have prisons is bitterly cold. The St Lawrence freezes hard. The US Army's premier cold weather unit, the 10th Mountain, is based at Fort Drum, and the Cold Regions Research & Engineering Laboratory is just a bit to the East in New Hampshire. Inland Alaska is very cold, but there's essentially no one there. Some oil workers on the North Slope, a few native settlements, and one very modest town in Fairbanks . . . these are colder places But Alaskans live in Juneau and Anchorage . . . those are the big towns, the only place where you'd be able to build any kind of Federal prison (you need transport in and out, access to courts and hospitals and so on). Having spent a winter in Juneau, and one in Plattsburgh, NY -- Plattsburgh was far colder. Juneau is a cold Pacific winter, but its only slightly below freezing. Upstate New York is a bitter cold, arctic winter . . . kind of place where you need engine block heaters to keep your car's fluids from freezing. Trust me: our prisons are in very, very, very unpleasant places, and the crowding in them makes them even worse. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer, running at double capacity . . . yes, you could create a work camp out on the tundra, but really, it wouldn't be much more severe than what we've already got. |
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August 6th, 2011, 05:39 PM | #102 |
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But for goodness sake,unless guilt has been proved beyond any reasonable doubt,then any decent juror with the brains they were born with should vote not guilty and continue doing so,irrespective of how petty or serious the allegation.The onus is on the accuser to prove guilt,not the accused to prove innocence.
I'm very much against the tampering with jury trial,majority verdicts and all the rest of the rubbish that's going on here.And I don't relish the prospect of anyone being wrongly puished for any crime.But the logical conclusion of the argument you advance is the doing away with custodial sentences. |
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August 6th, 2011, 05:44 PM | #103 | |
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Accepting that the Courts and Juries are, like everything else done by man, fallible-- do you want to put people to death on their judgment? Especially when you know that in some percentage of cases, years after the fact, evidence will emerge showing that the original verdict was wrong? If you've wrongfully imprisoned someone, you can release them after the fact -- it happens, quite a lot. If you've wrongfully executed someone? Then what? |
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August 6th, 2011, 05:58 PM | #104 |
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August 6th, 2011, 06:01 PM | #105 |
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It's tragic that anyone should be wrongfully convicted of anything,even if they're not sentenced to prison let alone death.He who would take my good name and all that.I'm not disputing this for a second.As I said,I wouldn't want restoration before double jeapordy and other wrongs were righted.And qualifying for jury service ought to be tough enough to weed out people like the fool who thought it okay to talk to the accused on Facebook.
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August 6th, 2011, 06:08 PM | #106 | ||
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But to say "if we were just really, really careful, we'll always be right-- well that's clearly wrong" As it is, US capital murder cases get extraordinary judicial review, they get better lawyers, get automatic appellate review at the highest level . . . . . . and yet it turns out that even after all that, the verdicts are still sometimes wrong. That's not some "correctable defect" in the system -- its inherent. We never have "perfect knowledge", and its not infrequent that, over time, new evidence turns up, or new techniques for examining old evidence. Knowing that, do you still want this system killing people? |
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August 6th, 2011, 06:08 PM | #107 |
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August 6th, 2011, 06:10 PM | #108 |
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I'm not sure, but I thought they got rid of that archaic law.
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August 6th, 2011, 06:13 PM | #109 | ||
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In the US, it is possible to try them under the law of another entity. For example in the 1960s in the South, we had racist killings where State juries were unwilling to convict white defendants of murder. These defendants were subsequently tried for other charges under Federal law. . . (Federal law doesn't have a distinct crime of "Federal Murder" . . . so the charge was something else "violating civil rights" or such) Quote:
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August 6th, 2011, 06:16 PM | #110 |
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The law still stands in Scotland,for the moment anyway.We have a different civil and criminal legal system to the rest of the British mainland,where,I'm sad to say,it has already been done away with.
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