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Are we promoting crime here in Australia?

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junmonkey

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It seems like the Australian laws favour the perpetrators and not the victim. Community service for blinding someone, and only 9 years jail for beating and raping two women? Its almost ridiculous when you read about it sometimes.

Chair leg attacker escapes jail

The Age -
The apprentice electrician who seriously injured a teenager when he attacked him with a chair, spearing his eye with a chair leg, was today ordered to do 400 hours of unpaid community work.

Foreign tourists' rapist jailed

April 24, 2007

A MAN will spend at least nine years in jail for beating and raping two foreign tourists in Western Australia's holiday town of Broome.
David Gundari, 32, from the Kununurra area, was sentenced to a maximum 12 years' jail when he appeared in West Australian District Court today on seven charges of sexual assault, sexual penetration, threatening to kill and causing grievous bodily harm.

Gundari attacked and then raped a 24-year-old French woman and a 32-year-old Japanese woman after dragging them into secluded areas in Broome last September.
 

The community work bit gets me particularly, in that often they just don't turn up to do it, and no one does a damn thing about it.

I'd like to see more victim/offender conferencing. Where this happens it has been quite successful. If the offender actually has to eyeball his victim who explains the impact of the crime on his/her life, this can sometimes actually present the victim with a reality such as he/she has simply never considered.
 
There's a very simple solution.
I've done jury duty before & once the jury has delivered their guilty/not guilty verdict that's it. Juries should have a say in the sentence. Judges have proven over & over that they are too out of touch with the real world too hand down reasonable & fair sentences.
Jurors, police, victims, prosecutors & the public are so often cheated when all the hard work of getting a guilty verdict against someone gos down the drain because of a single person (the Judge) handing out a weak sentence.
 
You'd reckon being "eyeballed" once by this guy would be enough!

But seriously, court cases are funny things and not having all the detail is often the cause of misapprehension. The victim, incredibly, in this case said he forgave his attacker, and the fracas started when the younger brother of the attacker was seriously assaulted. The terrible result of this thrown chair was a fairly unlikely result - albeit serious injury was forseeable - as with involuntary manslaughter.

Having said that, I agree the impact on the victims of crime should get more attention and conferencing be encouraged. The tendency to concentrate on the criminal probably has its foundation in a wish to understand and possibly influence their behaviour, for our benefit as much as their's. The yanks have a massively retaliatory sentencing system and it doesn't seem to do much for their society.

Maybe the shocking Aussie penal history causes some sympathy for people who make mistakes, but the incorrigible are a different matter.

Plenty of selfish criminals live their lives without ever caring about the consequences of any of their acts, criminal or otherwise on victims, strangers, acquaintences and families - no-one except themselves .
 
Rape is a whole different matter. I have seen several cases in the past where the bastards get off with amazing light sentences despite the crime, like raping a child, etc. Robbbing someone could be a crime of desperation due to circumstances. But sex crimes are a whole different ball game.
 
The judges priorities do make me wonder at times.

A guy in NSW gets 10 years for stealing artifacts from the Museum, fair enough, but then a guy gets community sentence for almost killing someone........................
 
junmonkey said:
Chair leg attacker escapes jail

The Age -
The apprentice electrician who seriously injured a teenager when he attacked him with a chair, spearing his eye with a chair leg, was today ordered to do 400 hours of unpaid community work.
Click to expand...

How about 400 hours, conference, apology and eye transplant donation?
 
I say bring back the days of public beatings and fruit throwing..... which one they get depends on what they did.
 
:iamwithst beatings and fruit throwing..... which one they get depends on what they did[/QUOTE]

:iamwithst TOTALLY AGREE MINT BUT INSTEAD OF FRUIT HOW ABOUT ROCKS (FRIUTS TO EXPENSIVE DUE TO DROUGHT):
 
:iamwithst TOTALLY AGREE MINT BUT INSTEAD OF FRUIT HOW ABOUT ROCKS (FRIUTS TO EXPENSIVE DUE TO DROUGHT):
Click to expand...
[/quote]

Now settle guys!!! - thats what the Taliban do in Afganistan!!!!

I'm all for tougher penalties and public humiliation - esp for rape etc.
Permanent Electronic tagging should be the go for all violent offenders in my book. And any community service should be decided by the victim - possibly including working directly for the victim in some way and charity work.
 
justjohn said:
TOTALLY AGREE MINT BUT INSTEAD OF FRUIT HOW ABOUT ROCKS (FRIUTS TO EXPENSIVE DUE TO DROUGHT):
Click to expand...
Some rocks are getting a tad pricey too.

I suppose you can recycle the rock though; hit a dopey criminal over the head with it, then pick it up and sell it to China.
 

Not really, you can't hand pick one case out of countless thousands and say judges are out of touch. Not to mention you only get 1/100000 of the entire case in the OP. You have absolutely no idea.

The very reason what you suggest doesn't happen is because most people are idiots and highly prejudiced. This results in any given person either having a severely cruel verdict or an unjustifiably lenient one.
 
We need to have a go at breeding the bad guys out. To do this we need to improve education from the cradle which includes educating families at the bottom of the food chain. And in this some families may in fact have to be closely supervised for the sake of the/(our) children.

It has been proven that no amount of punishment every really dropped crime rates very much. Yes NY's zero based tolerance has done some good but in most cases has merely displaced it to somewhere else.

We have grog over the counter, cigarettes and free gambling which exposes the perpetrators clearly. So we need to also legalise all other drugs etc., to over the counter so that further tax can be raised and the authorities can more readily identify those with a problem and go about treating them accordingly. An injecting room would become a sort of a club and could be policed. This would also free up huge amounts of police resources from chasing the drug trade too.

And if people want to kill themselves, then let them. Smokers are doing it all the time and at huge cost to our medical system.
 
I'll drink to that the whole business is a mess but like any thing else no one can change it with out the do gooders stepping in and the bible bashers wanting a say.

A kid push's a note over the corner store counter saying give me your money and get 10yrs, a Sakse type person who has 1g in his bank account is given his passport back so he can go over seas, if the kid was before the judge if would be a different story, we look upon the rich as some sort of hero.
 
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