And you don't go to jail at all for pot!Follow

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080430/ap_on_re_eu/crime_and_punishment

Repeatedly rape your child? Check
Father 7 kids with her? Check
Incinerate one of the kids? Check
Keep the others locked up for 19 years in the basement? Check
Out in time for the youngest one's high school graduation? Check

What do you have to do over there to get life?

--DK

What would low treason net you?

What do you have to do over there to get life?

You shouldn't for nearly anything. It's only in totalitarian countries where life in prison is used as a punishment for a wide variety of crimes.

So now it comes out that he threatened to gas his victims. This is too weird. Did he think they were Jewish?

Huh, interesting. He would have been a young child during the Holocaust. Wonder what he internalized about hiding in cellars and such.

No, there they chop off your hands and/or lash you.

You know, if I steal a candy bar, I might opt for than hand chopping over be imprisoned for life, as has happened in the US.

That says everything about the justice system right there.

I assumed people would know I was referring to Europe seeing as how that's pretty much what the article is about.

Aroo? Cite?

http://www.threestrikes.org/calaw01.html


Jerry Dewayne Williams
3rd Strike Theft of a slice of pizza
Sentence: 25 years to life, reduced to 6
On a warm evening in July 1994 Jerry Williams was having a few drinks and relaxing on the Redondo Beach pier. After he and a friend had bought some slices of pizza, they noticed a group of kids dining on an extra-large pepperoni pie and demanded some of theirs. The oldest child refused, but Williams and his friend each took a piece anyway. The friend got away, but Williams was arrested in a nearby arcade after the pizza shop owner called the police. The Los Angeles District Attorney charged Williams with robbery, saying he used intimidation to scare the kids. In the end, the jury hung on the robbery charge but convicted Williams of petty theft with priors, netting him a 25 years to life sentence.

I can't find the candy bar guy, so let's amend my previous post to "a slice of pizza"

The problem is democracy and people being stupid selfish idiots.

If you pass a law making theft punishable by 5 years, but theft doesn't vanish, what can you do? Pass a law punishing it by 10 years! It's neigh impossible to pass a law reducing jail time and increase rehab programs, so it just goes one way. Obviously longer sentence don't and never have had any deterrent effect, so you end up with stupider and stupider punishments that judges ignore because they're clearly ludicrous caricatures unrelated to the actual crime.

Well then you can campaign on the soft judges and pass mandatory sentencing laws! Yay! Then eventually you end up where we are in most states, with ludicrously disproportionate sentencing making going trial almost impossible even for completely innocent people faced with the prospect of plea bargaining for 1 year and probation or going to trial to face a mandatory 25 years.

I'm sure the next step will be to eliminate plea bargaining. We're just that close to solving crime.

He is one bad butt rape from keeling over.


This is Austrian prison, though. It's all Mozart and schnitzel.

There's enough cholesterol in a Wiener Sachertorte to finish off the old bugger.

I don't understand why people are frustrated about the Justice system in Europe, despite this one case over there, I don't see how people think that the justice system there is less effective. We have much more crime than any country in Western Europe, including violent crime. We have 1% of people in jail, the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world. I don't know--if anything, I think we should worry alot more about our own justice system.


Edited, May 1st 2008 2:27pm by Annabella