Scots Taffer on 24/5/2006 at 10:29
OrbWeaver wins the Obtuseness Award of 2006.
Ajare on 24/5/2006 at 10:29
Not to mention the necrophilia! You may as well get the most out of the deal.
Of course, the argument doesn't work, because life doesn't actually mean life. It's 14 years in the UK.
Fingernail on 24/5/2006 at 10:30
Quote Posted by OrbWeaver
Indeed. In fact I don't understand this at all - assuming the average life expectancy is 80 years, if you abuse a 10-year-old they have to live with the consequences for the next 70 years. If you abuse an 18-year-old, they have to live with the consequences for the next 62 years.
For some reason, causing somebody 70 years of psychological damage is considered to be OMG TEH EVIL whereas causing somebody 62 years of the same is just run-of-the-mill crime.
Aha, but once you cross the magical 18 year mark, your brain suddenly learns how to deal with the trauma in a right-thinking and adult way!
OrbWeaver on 24/5/2006 at 10:42
Quote Posted by Scots_Taffer
OrbWeaver wins the Obtuseness Award of 2006.
Or maybe the "I-prefer-to-analyse-things-rationally-rather-than- turning-into-a-drooling-hysterical-freak-any-time-children-are-mentioned" award, which has thus far gone unclaimed every year.
Quote Posted by Ajare
Of course, the argument doesn't work, because life doesn't actually mean life. It's 14 years in the UK.
An irrelevant implementation detail. The argument is that paedophiles should not automatically get the most extreme sentence (like what murderers get) just to satisfy the public hysteria, irrespective of whether it is called "life".
Quote Posted by Fingernail
Aha, but once you cross the magical 18 year mark, your brain suddenly learns how to deal with the trauma in a right-thinking and adult way!
I think it's more a case that when you cross the magical 18-year mark, you no longer matter.
Scots Taffer on 24/5/2006 at 10:45
No, you're a drooling hysterical freak without the mere mention of children. So don't worry your little psychotic head.
Ajare on 24/5/2006 at 11:02
Quote Posted by OrbWeaver
An irrelevant implementation detail. The argument is that paedophiles should not automatically get the most extreme sentence (like what murderers get) just to satisfy the public hysteria, irrespective of whether it is called "life".
Actually, I just spoke to the prison service, and I'm wrong on the 14 years thing. But still, it's completely relevant to your point:
Quote:
Well if they did give automatic life sentences to paedophiles, as some people seem to want, you might as well murder them since you wouldn't get any worse a sentence
Because you
would get a worse sentence, because 'life' in practical terms means anything from ten years upwards, depending on the severity of the crime(s). Unless of course you're advocating 'life means life', which I don't think anyone is.
Hesche on 24/5/2006 at 11:37
Thread preview: easy to read one or twoliners are replaced by torrents of drivel.
Tip for people with lessened attention span after lunch: quit reading, go to work.
OrbWeaver on 24/5/2006 at 11:38
Quote Posted by Ajare
Because you
would get a worse sentence, because 'life' in practical terms means anything from ten years upwards, depending on the severity of the crime(s)..
Fine. As long as there is a scale of punishment to match the severity of the offense (which there is), it doesn't matter whether it is referred to as "life", "10 years" or something else.
Nevertheless, the fact is that when sex offenses and children are mentioned, there is a certain class of people that will abandon the idea of a scale of punishment and call for the maximum possible sentence no matter what, which, despite certain facile comments in this thread,
does lead to a situation where perpetrators of smaller-scale offenses are encouraged to commit more serious crimes in order to avoid detection, on the basis that they would receive no worse a punishment for doing so.
Myoldnamebroke on 24/5/2006 at 12:00
Of course, all this is a tangent generated by my throwaway remark to highlight the fact that you made an argument based on the years of trama a crime victim has to endure.
'Rape an OAP, get community service!'
For one thing, sexual abuse is never seen as 'run of the mill' crime, no matter what age the victim is - 10, 18, 35, whatever. There is a special revulsion attached to paedophilia, but just because it's easy for some to get overemotional about the issue doesn't mean there isn't any justification behind treating it on a more serious scale. Surely you must be able to understand where people are coming from, even if you don't endorse it yourself? There's an issue of increased vulnerability in children that makes any sort of violence against them more horrific, not to mention the fact that a 10 year old is not viewed as a sexual being at all, whereas at 18 year old is. And without wishing to create some kind of league table of unpleasantness, there are often elements of manipulation in paedophilia that for whatever reason seem to somehow make the crime 'feel' worse.
Ultimately, of course, rationality not feeling has to have the controlling hand in the justice system. However, how else are we to 'rank' our crimes in order of severity than in the way they make the majority of people feel? Generating some kind of utilitarian-stylee badness scale for crime would be nuts and in all likelihood fail, and would make you face head-on just how democratic you wanted lawmaking to be.
Also: 'being a paedophile' isn't itself a crime. The people in this case are being punished according to what they actually did, which is why there are different punishments. They can't 'all get the same amount of time' because they didn't all do the same thing.
Dr. Dumb_lunatic on 24/5/2006 at 12:17
You can also be given multiple life sentences, can't you?
And these can be served concurrently (er...which seems pointless), or consecutively, which can effectively mean actual life imprisonment.
Anyway, I'm with the anti-"knee-jerk" crowd. Yay for reason.
